You're indeed dependent on whether the database in question supports it. You'll also need to take the overhead into account. Lot of inserts/updates also means a lot of notifications and your Java code has to handle them consistently, else it will bubble up.
If the datamodel allows it, just add an extra column which holds a timestamp which get updated on every insert/update. Most major DB's supports an auto-update of the column on every insert/update. I don't know which DB server you're using, so I'll give only a MySQL-targeted example:
CREATE TABLE mytable (
id BIGINT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
somevalue VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
lastupdate TIMESTAMP NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
INDEX (lastupdate)
)
This way you don't need to worry about inserting/updating the lastupdate yourself. You can just do an INSERT INTO mytable (somevalue) VALUES (?) or UPDATE mytable SET somevalue = ? WHERE id = ? and the DB will do the magic.
After ensuring that the DB server's time and Java application's time are the same, you can just fire a background thread (using either Timer with TimerTask, or ScheduledExecutorService with Runnable or Callable) which does roughly this:
Date now = new Date();
statement = connection.prepareStatement("SELECT id FROM mytable WHERE lastupdate BETWEEN ? AND ?");
statement.setDate(1, this.lastTimeChecked);
statement.setDate(2, now);
resultSet = statement.executeQuery();
while (resultSet.next()) {
// Handle accordingly.
}
this.lastTimeChecked = now;
Update: as per the question update it turns out that you have no control over the DB. Well, then you don't have much good/efficient options. Either just refresh the entire list in Java memory with entire data from DB without checking/comparing for changes (probably the fastest way), or dynamically generate a SQL query based on the current data which excludes the current data from the results.
