Therein lies the problem, your simple trigger will fire ALL THE TIME. When all I want to watch is record A value B. Triggers are expensive, do you really want to weigh your tables down with unnecessary trigger calls? Clearly you are only dealing with a couple hundred transactions a second, but when things get into the thousands, and at peak millions, placing a trigger on a database is sheer stupidity. Triggers which are utilized are due to bad planning, last resort efforts/or because of crap code. Three guesses which one is usually the culprit? No wonder DBA's are annoyed with programmers.