Effective strategy for leaving an audit trail/change history for DB applications?

Question

What are some strategies that people have had success with for maintaining a change history for data in a fairly complex database. One of the applications that I frequently

Answer 1

One strategy you could use is MVCC, Multi-Value Concurrency Control. In this scheme, you never do updates to any of your tables, you just do inserts, maintaining version numbers for each record. This has the advantage of providing an exact snapshot from any point in time, and it also completely sidesteps the update lock problems that plague many databases.

But it makes for a huge database, and selects all require an extra clause to select the current version of a record.