Watching a table for change in MySQL?

Question

Is there a better way to watch for new entries in a table besides selecting from it every n ticks of time or something like that?

I have a table that an external pro

Answer 1

Here's what I do: I've got some triggers set up for the table (insert, delete, update) and those triggers increment a counter in another table. My DB access code keeps a local counter and compares it to the returned value, ultimately sending a bool back to the caller, answering the question IsDataCurrent().

Our programs that use this DB access code either poll or check it on-request and then make the appropriate calls to keep themselves up to date.

I'm sure there are other ways to solve this. It worked for me pretty well, though.