I generally use a combination of both approaches. For entities with a complex lifecycle or which lots of updates or concurrency, I tend to prefer to ES approach

I generally use a combination of both approaches. For entities with a complex lifecycle or which lots of updates or concurrency, I tend to prefer to ES approach. But for value objects, enumerations and lookup values, I'll go more with the approach he describes. In the past I used the RDMBS trigger approach he describes, but have now moved to doing this more in the application layer (typically with ORM signals/events) because you can more easily write unit tests for it and make your code more portable. Neither of those are always requirements, though. Would be interesting to see an ORM that could express triggers and generate trigger code in a declarative manner. Haven't seen anything like that, but could provide for some performance advantages in certain cases. Probably more complexity than it's worth, though.