Database events but not triggers
Most major DBMS products today have facilities for this: it may be called

Change Data Capture (Oracle, SQL Server)
logical replication (Postgres, MySQL)

Most of these facilities operate on the publish/subscribe model and build upon the DBMS's built-in transaction logs to provide a stream of change events. Often the amount of logging will increase slightly because the primary key has to be included in the stream rather than just physical information about which blocks have changed.
Organisationally, you may encounter resistance to implementing things like this with conservative DBAs and organisations (I have encountered this several times when trying to implement Oracle CDC), while it's not likely to be an issue where they have switched to, or are using open-source DBMSes (more  open to change).