As a developer of client/server and now n-tier applications, I have great love the the power, reliability and speed of database systems. Having said this I am very hesitant to do process logging in a db. Storing a current status or critical state transitions of a complex workflow in a db is great, but loggin/tracing all of the steps in the DB can be an issue. If the reason for logging is to be able to trace failures and possibly debug the system, I need to be able to process my "Log" in the direst of circumstances. What if my db/network/? are not functional in some way. If I can get to the server at all, a text file let's me debug with vi/emacs/notepad/*. Not the most powerful of toolsets but always available. A well formatted log file can also have reports generated by use of grep/awk/sed, etc. Again, not the most powerful but readily available. In the end, if I expect my logging to be used in failure scenarios, I need to have the highest availability possible, and presuming I am in a failure state, I can't assume that my DB will still be running.
