First off, nice post, I will start playing with this some more. Also, I do agree with some of the others who have mentioned that this solution does not provide the "who dunnit and when" which is important for SOX or HIPPA auditing. I have used a solution in the past where we just implemented the same trigger on any table we wanted to audit. This trigger would "asynchronously" audit any data changes (even deletes) and publish them using the SQL Server Service Broker. The auditing database could then be centralized whereever we wanted, and if needed, all databases could publish "audits" to the SB channel, and it didn't matter if the auditing database moved to a different server in the future. Again, everything was Async so none of the ETL processing was slowed down. We did not create those god-awful "copy a table and its schema" solutions and just add the same records to them approach I see others doing.