That you don’t like to answer direct questions…
i think you should forget about triggers and just set the created_on and updated_on columns in your INSERT and UPDATE statements
The auditors must love you!!
Can you please answer this question since I seem to have misunderstodd your stance on Nulls and Empty Strings…
“Why is it that you find Zero-Length Strings to be even worse than Nulls??”
TomTees
Nothing is ever easy… is it?!
Based on what you pasted from the manual, let’s focus for a moment on:
Let’s say that when a record is first created, I want “created_on” and “updated_on” to automatically get a system time-stamp.
And then when a record is updated, I want “updated_on” to automatically get a system time-stamp.
I know I read somewhere on the Internet, that there was some way to trick MySQL to accomplish what I want above without having to use triggers…
Does that ring any bells, r937?
TomTees
years of experience has given me a dislike for empty strings, as they are more awkward to deal with in SQL
besides, zero-length strings don’t work for DATE or DATETIME columns
Here is another article that is pretty close to what I remember, however the article I would like to find did a much more thorough job of describing this and several other hacks to get different desired outcomes.
Comments anyone?
TomTees
I know I saved the blog article, unfortunately it is on one of my computers in storage?! 
The trick involved using Nulls to allow you to get the TIMESTAMP to automatically update two columns.
This link sorta coveres what I remember, but the author isn’t very detailed and appears to have left out basic syntax in his CREATE TABLE statement.
Does that set off any lightbulbs?
TomTees