Designing a database that tracks changes

[Anon]

Greetings all!

Need your help and input:

I'm writing an application that requires the user to make changes to the data, but a record of the changes must be kept. I thought about creating one table of all the records and identify each related item with an ID.

OR... I thought about creating an additional table that creates records of the changes made to the original record that's linked by an ID or the original record.

Anyone with experience in this? Is there a proven method of keeping track of record changes for quality control?

Someone please enlighten me on the pros and cons of creating such systems.

Thanks,
Leslie :-)

[Anon]

Would it be possible to use an existing verison control system for this and just have php make calls to it for loggin changes, etc?

CVS (www.cvshome.org) is the open source version control software of choice.

Also, if you arn't already, ALWAYS use version control on all your software/web projects. You'll be a better coder for it.