[anonetal]

It's not very efficient if you have a large number of triggers. There was an early research prototype called Triggerman (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/754942/) which attempted to scale triggers, but most implementations are still clunky (probably because of the transactional guarantees required by triggers).

Materialized views (that the article talks about) is a related concept, but only a few databases really support that.

Both of these are also related to the work on 'Stream Databases', where the problems of efficient recomputation are central. There is a ton of work on this in academic research (http://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783540286073), but it hasn't been able to gain a foothold in the data management market (several of the academic research projects transitioned into startups).