For example, a human resources (HR) application requires that every employee manager receive an informational e-mail immediately after an employee’s leave request is submitted. When a record is written into a table that stores employee leave requests, a created trigger fires and invokes the e-mail-sending procedure to the manager.

Another common trigger use is to save important original data, in its unchanged state, to maintain an audit trail or ensure that the original data remains accessible in the event of accidental changes. For example, the same HR application may contain a trigger that is executed when an employee's bank details are changed. The trigger first saves the original information to another table; this allows data modification.