Is there a way to programmatically detect if a certain row has changed in a database table?
I want my application to know the instant that a table row has been modified. I can always do a standard query update loop, yet I was wondering if there was a better easier way that I am overlooking.
The only mechanism currently supported by MySQL is a trigger. You can set a trigger to happen when an update occurs, and use that trigger to do something to notify your application using sys_exec() or similar.
Note that the update trigger only catches when an update is made through SQL, not otherwise (such as APIs, NDB, for example).