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 program updates very often, and clients can watch for this new data as it arrive, how can I make that without having to set a fixed period of repeatable select statements?

Answer 1

In MySQL there’s no best way than to poll (you create a specific table to simplify the polling though), in other databases you can have triggers that have impact outside the database. In MySQL triggers can only do stuff inside the database itself (for instance, populating the helper table).