Generating a log file of all data changes

April 11, 200817 yr

(I'm putting it here because I classify it as "exporting" data out of filemaker, but it's not really. I didn't know where else to put it).

I need to generate/export a log file of all changes made to any record in the database. IE, if a user changes anything, it gets noted in a log "At 12:05pm 01/04/2008, Username modified FieldName in record RecordName".

And the log-file just racks these up. The problem, obviously, is that it could get rather large, rather fast.

What is the best (most efficient) way of doing this? I've got a small-ish database at the moment, but needs to be able to scale to an enterprise-level if needed.

My thoughts are to have a global text field in one of the tables.

a) Any scripts that change the data would get modified to also add a line to the global text field.

: Any data that the user has direct access to would need to automatically run a script whenever a user modifies data, is this possible?

c) In order to stop the logfile getting too large in the global text-field, I would set up a script to purge it once a month to a text file. How can I get it to save this text file to the server?

Is it possible to not have the global text field at all, but have the server write lines to a text-file whenever it needs to? This would be less efficient, wouldn't it?

Suggestions? Comments? Anything I'm assuming that wouldn't work?

I would have thought this was a fairly common feature in databases, and there'd be documentation and/or forum posts on the issue already, but I can't find any.