 <p>Trigger are no differnt from other code, there are good triggers and porly written ones. The poorly written ones cause problems in both performance and data quality. Because so few people writing the triggers have understood how to write them correctly, triggers have gotten a bad reputation since so many of them are bad. </p> <p>Developers also tend to forget about triggers and then get frustrated when they can't figure out why something they think is strange (but which is really the designed action) is happening. It is not the trigger's fault when the developers aren't competent to troubleshoot data issues.</p> <p>For updated date, it is short-sighted at best not to populate with a trigger. Data is changed from more than the application, if you need the updated date, the trigger is the appropriate place for it. Unfortunately in today's world, the great God of "easy to maintain" is crippling many of our systems from both a performance and a data quality perspective.</p>