Ardel Grider wrote:Is there a better method than for my program to check the data every X seconds?
This has the advantage of being simple. Solutions which involve triggers can have several problems -- most obviously using a trigger which writes to a file can slow down database updates, although maybe not significantly. But you also have to worry what happens with simultaneous updates, when two instances of the trigger try to write to the text file at the same time. Of course it depends on how many rows you're monitoring and how frequently you expect them to be updated. And on how many users are watching the rows for updates.
Personally I would just write code to refresh the data every few seconds until that was shown to be unsatisfactory for some reason, just because it's a lot simpler. Like the arrivals and departures screen at the airport.