Microsoft® SQL Server 2012 Unleashed

Identifying Changed Columns

In addition to information about which rows were changed and the operation that caused the change (insert, update, or delete—reported as I, U, or D in the SYS_CHANGE_OPERATION), the CHANGETABLE(CHANGES ...) function also provides information on which columns were modified if you enabled the TRACK_COLUMNS_UPDATED option. You can use this information to determine whether any action is needed in your client application based on which columns changed.

To identify whether a specific column has changed, you can use the CHANGE_TRACKING_IS_COLUMN_IN_MASK (column_id, change_columns) function. This function interprets the SYS_CHANGE_COLUMNS bitmap value returned by the CHANGETABLE(CHANGES ...) function and returns a 1 if the ...