to be honest cursor / loop = row by agonising row operations within triggers would be my worst nightmare for a production database. The overhead of deferred updates is also critical as this will cause fragmentation of table/index structures thus degrading performance further. We did the threads over loops and cursors so I'm not going to comment further. Itzik Ben-Gan has some good examples of where a cursor works faster and better, however, that's not really part of this thread.

I agree auditing is important, SOX, and it's tricky, and there are not too many alternatives, but triggers have, in my experience, not been the best solution.