While this is an interesting method (packaged in a broad, bait-ish claim), I'd like to see where the described benefits are actually worth the increased complexity and difficulty: for situations with a few 10-100.000 inserts/day, you will not run into locking issues and beyond that, the wasted disk space will become noticeable to prohibitive, especially on cloud-hosted systems. History and undo might be useful in some situations (not likely with password changes as in the example though), debugging is probably better achieved with rotated logs, not extra data in your database (which you might want to backup regularly...).