In our application we use AFTER triggers to maintain an audit trail. We need to maintain a history of changes to the data. We know that this causes a huge performance degradation. Is there a better alternative to this solution?

Has anyone implemented stored procedures to improve performance? And does it really speed things up?

The way I look at it the following steps would be involved:

1. Select the row to update

2. Compare the changed values

3. Update the record

4. Insert the audit record.

Any suggestions

Thanks