<p>Is there a better way to watch for new entries in a table besides selecting from it every n ticks of time or something like that?</p>

<p>I have a table that an external program updates very often, and clients can watch for this new data as it arrive, how can I make that without having to set a fixed period of repeatable select statements?</p>

Here's what I do:
I've got some triggers set up for the table (insert, delete, update) and those triggers increment a counter in another table.  My DB access code keeps a local counter and compares it to the returned value, ultimately sending a bool back to the caller, answering the question IsDataCurrent().
Our programs that use this DB access code either poll or check it on-request and then make the appropriate calls to keep themselves up to date.
I'm sure there are other ways to solve this.  It worked for me pretty well, though.