Getting the date/time of the last change to a MySQL database

Question

I\'m working with MySQL and I would like to get the date/time of the very last change to any table within a database. Each of my tables has an auto updating \'*_modified\' time

Answer 1

The accepted answer is great, but I think a better format in case it's not immediately apparent to a rookie would be:

SELECT table_name, update_time
FROM   information_schema.tables
WHERE  table_schema = 'myDBName'
order by update_time DESC

Since, we don't always know what table(s) have been touched, and this has the bonus of giving a clue as to what the activity was by showing the most-recently-updated tables.