Ever had a situation where you're OLTP requirements are impeded by your OLAP implementation, well to put it another way - have you ever come across an auditing solution that causes transactions to timeout when you're trying to save data into your production database. Well the answer for me is far to often for my liking and this is an example of 'synchronous auditing' and I believe this is an anti-pattern in the making. I'm firmly in the camp that believes auditing should be done asynchronously by a different (application) process. The reasons why I think it's an anti-pattern is because, if how you audit affects the performance of your production database then your performance is going to degrade overtime, and if you insert 500,000 audit records a day that's going to occur relatively quickly. Now DBAs would say lets put a maintenance plan in place to clear down \manage the audit database, or even remove the synchronous auditing and perform a batch load o...