Change Data Capture (CDC) and Change Tracking (CT) can be classified as the same names but both have different purposes, which are introduced in the SQL Server 2008 version.

CDC is an asynchronous process mechanism that captures all changes of a data row from the transaction flow and stores them in change tables. CDC is useful in avoiding the expensive query methods such as triggers or multiple-join to capture the changes made to the data.

CT is a light-weight synchronous mechanism that tracks data modifications but records only the fact that the row has been changed, like writing leaf level information of modified data. CT is very useful to represent a consistent view of modified data and detect data conflicts quickly.

In this recipe, we will look at how to design a change tracking methodology that uses CT functionality to detect DML operations.