Choosing the Right Audit Trail Approach in Ruby

PaperTrail and Audited are very popular gems that integrate with the ActiveRecord object-relational mapper (ORM) by using model callbacks to allow auditing data changes.When a record is created, updated, or deleted, they insert an additional record that stores changes in a single audit table. This table stores the before/after state in JSON or JSONB formats and a reference pointing to the original record.This approach is implemented purely on the application level and can be easily enabled for any ActiveRecord-supported database such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, or SQLite.