[Chicago-talk] Design Question

[Jay Strauss]

Richard,

Polling your database, should be relatively inexpensive,

IF (I stress if):

1) you have an index on some value that lets the DB look it up easily. 
Ideally you'd have a column with a (Y or <NULL>) value in it, indicating 
that this is a NEW phone number.  When you're done processing this 
record, you set the value to NULL.  This way your index is very small, 
only containing the new record.

2) you are using a "bind" variable in your DBI (I hope you are using 
DBI).  That way the DB isn't reprocessing your SQL over and over and over.

Most RDBMSs (I don't remember which you are using), have a cache, where 
they store recently read data, so that subsequent reads of the same data 
are faster.  In your case, you can make it so that your polling activity 
is pretty lightweight.  And you could avoid building a 
posting/subscription/broadcast thing others had suggested.

Thanks
Jay