monitoring mysql for changes

Question

I have a Java app using a MySQL database through hibernate. The database is really used as persistence layer: The database is read at the initial load of the program, and

Answer 1

One option would be tail the binary logs (or setup a replication slave) and look for changes relevant to your application. This is likely to be a quite involved solution.

Another would be to add a "last_updated" indexed column to the relevant tables (you can even have mysql update this automatically) and poll for changes since the last time you checked. The queries should be very cheap.