Kendra Little discusses having a reusable event logging tool for your database work:
You can’t, and shouldn’t log everything, because logging events can slow you down. And you shouldn’t always log to a database, either– you can keep logs in the application tier as well, no argument here.
But most applications periodically do ‘heavy’ or batch database work. And when those things happen, it can make a lot of sense to log to the database. That’s where this logging comes in.
Bonus points if you feed this kind of logging into Splunk (or your logging analysis tool of choice) and integrate it with application-level logging.