alternative to polling database?

Question

I have an application that works as follows: Linux machines generate 28 different types of letter to customers. The letters must be sent in .docx (Microsoft Word format). A secr

Answer 1

A message queue might work well, as they're usually setup to be able to block for a while without wasting resources. But with MySQL, I don't think that's an option.

If you just want to reduce load on the DB, you could create a table with a single row: the latest job ID. Then clients just need to compare that to their last ID to see if they need to run a full poll against the real table. This way the overhead should be greatly reduced, if it's an issue now.