DCPeterson, on the subject of a "server side trace". I'm not clear on what you mean by that. Are you talking about something outside the database, or some feature of SQL 2005/2000 that I'm unaware of? (I've read that SQL 2008 will offer more built-in auditing features, but haven't had a chance to play with those yet.) Or do you just mean running Profiler constantly?

Just running Profiler constantly will give you a log, but the files will quickly fill up a lot of disk space, and can't be queried the way log tables can (at least, not easily). If you have Profiler inserting into tables, the performance hit is just about the same as using triggers, as is the space used.

Could be done. Like any of the other methods, it has advantages and disadvantages. I can't think of an easy way to query such data to readily get the complete history of a particular row in a particular table, to run undo commands, or to track workflow data for management reports. On the other hand, you could get performance data right in your audit log, which could be useful for other things.