Question - What are triggers? What are the different types of triggers in SQL Server 2000?
Answer -
It's very beneficial for a potential database developer to know the types of triggers available, and how to implement them.
A trigger is a specialized type of stored procedure that is bound to a table or view in SQL Server 2000. In SQL Server 2000, there are INSTEAD-OF triggers and AFTER triggers. INSTEAD-OF triggers are procedures that execute in place of a Data Manipulation Language (DML) statement on a table. For example, if I have an INSTEAD-OF-UPDATE trigger on TableA, and I execute an update statement on that table, the code in the INSTEAD-OF-UPDATE trigger will execute instead of the update statement that I executed.
An AFTER trigger executes after a DML statement has taken place in the database. These types of triggers are very handy for auditing data changes that have occurred in your database tables.