Plamen,

Thanks for responding.

In fact, I have stored audit tables in a separate database on one
occasion. Also, I'm currently working on a database project where we
are storing contracts. We are going to keep contract pricing terms in
a way very similar to the way you handled your bill of materials--with
a start and end date. In this way, users will be able to store/view
contract terms for the same product/service as they apply today and
also as they applied in the past and will apply in the future.
However, I don't think of this as an "audit" function in the strict
sense because we are not really tracking changes to records. For
example, if someone enters pricing terms for a future date range and
then changes the price, I am not going to have a record of it.

One thing that I have to ensure is that overlapping date ranges for
the same product do not occur. I'm wondering how you handled this.
For example did you create a constraint in your database, did you
place a check in an update/insert trigger, did you handle it in a
stored procedure when the user entered a new part version or some
other approach?

Bill