question about column types and lengths

Hi, I apologize beforehand for how long this is. I have a hard time explaining my thoughts without a lot of words. I'm tracking deltas of table rows for a migration effort. Going to go the brute force route and install a trigger on each column in each table and create and audit record for each insert update delete. the audit record will look like this: ACTION | COLUMN | COLUMN | ...... | TIMESTAMP. The ACTION will either by i, u or d for insert update or delete. I'm writing a script to generate all the triggers. Having issues with being able to know exactly which column type for each column because the coltype, collength etc.. from syscolumns isn't easy to interpret. I have values in there that aren't even documented ( for eg.. 269 for a varchar ). Plus how to tell if a datetime is year to day or year to second, I don't know all the different collength values. So here's what I'm thinking. For the audit table, when I store a row all I need to do is ensure there is enough room for the values that get stored, and I need to know if I should quote the data value when regenerating a query for the target database. An example would be, I have a table called student with 4 columns sid, fname and lname,date I insert the values 1,'fred' ',flinstone',today My audit record would look like: 1, fred flinstone 4/17/2009 I will generate a query from that. so 2 things I need to know are: 1) how much room I have to store the columns in the audit table ( if the lname column for that table is a varchar(50) I need to make sure the lname col in it's audit table is also at least 50 characters. 2) if the datatype is a type that needs to be quoted when inserting or updating. For eg, when generating an insert the sid doesn't need quotes around it, but the string values do. To make it simple on myself I'm thinking of using the collength column from syscolumns to be the determiner of how big the audit table column should be. Will that work ? So for datetime year to day, the collength from syscolumns is 2052. So I can just make the column in the audit table that would be used to hold that audit record to be a varchar(2052). That will ensure no data gets truncated in the audit table. Will that work ? To make the decision about whether a value needs quoting, I am thinking that only datatypes that are these below: can be inserted without quotes around them. Everything else will need to be quoted. 1 = SMALLINT 2 = INTEGE R 3 = FLOAT 4 = SMALLFLOAT 5 = DECIMAL 6 = SERIAL * thanks in advance ! Floyd