There are some other ways to get to record level, such as adding a field with a default value of GETDATE(), and/or adding an AFTER INSERT, or AFTER UPDATE trigger (or both), but such things can carry some level of performance hit if the insert or update volume is high enough, so they're not always the right way to go. Once again, the answer is: "it depends". It's usually a question of performance vs. the need for the information.