Triggers - when you want to eat your cake and have it too ...

Hi All,

I already know the answer to the question but maybe someone has come
across it previously and come up with an excellent solution.

We load a lot of information from external systems in batch mode. By
batch mode I mean we have a header and detail file and there could be
thousands of detail records to the one header.

We need to implement a quite specific audit over changes to the detail
records and to do this we are using a trigger.

Works great!

But commonly many of the loaded batches may be deleted and reloaded either
to cater for change in business rules as part of the load or something has
changed on the source system.

So when this happens we do physical deletes and the trigger fires and
saves an audit of the deleted record but in this case we do not want the
audit so we have another trigger on the header file and if the header is
deleted we delete the audit records which while that works is very
inefficient.

So I was just wondering if anyone has come across an efficient way to have
a trigger write an audit if a single record is maintained or updated but
not if the entire range of records for a batch is deleted.

Thanks you for any suggestions.


Don Brown