Note that this places the onus on the developer to code the audit stuff for EVERY SINGLE DML OPERATION ON EACH TABLE. A trigger can be written once and will capture ALL DML operations, regardless of provenance. Even if your devs are rigorous, what about that quick "oopsie" data cleanup operation you need to do because someone screwed something up. Will you ALWAYS remember to do the MERGE, even for ad hoc DML?