In your example, a ticketing system is a pretty usual audit trail, I think.

So the problem ticket is raised, a developer or on-call person picks it up, writes the SQL update to the ticket, runs it on a test version of the production db, pastes the result in the ticket request, then the ticket goes to a DB admin who executes it by cut/paste from the ticket (maybe after their own review!) again pasting the result into the ticket resolution.