Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Internals

The Basics: Triggers and Event Notifications

Although the majority of this chapter is concerned with larger and more complex eventing infrastructures, the basics of how SQL Server internally deals with events can be learned more easily through an investigation of triggers and event notifications; therefore, they are a good place to begin.

Triggers come in a couple of basic varieties. Data Manipulation Language (DML) triggers can be defined to fire on operations like inserts and updates, and Data Definition Language (DDL) triggers can be defined to fire on either server-level or database-level actions such as creating a login or dropping a table. DML triggers can fire instead of the triggering event, or after the event has completed but before the ...