An scheduled external process does a SELECT TOP n from my logging table and sends batches of e-mail.

What does this?  Do you use a timed sql job, or do you have an external program (service?) running that queries the table every n seconds?

TIA,

Thor

PS.  Does all this staging stuff still make sense if the trigger is an after trigger?

It looks like I'll need to run a report-generating program using xp_cmdshell (doh!), and I don't want it fubaring the database...