I am trying to find out if its possible to use php to find out when a table was last updated. But I would ideally like to do it without querying the database!!!!! I was thinking of using filemtime but the Database is on a shared server and I dont have access to the '/var/lib/mysql' file location. Any ideas?
It would typically be impossible without you having to access the database in some fashion. Can I ask why you need to check when a table was last updated and the problem in querying the table?
Cheers for the reply absorbation. I was trying to minimise database queries as I am on a shared host and I am getting a reasonable amount of traffic and I am starting to get too many concurrent connections. That is causing users to get errors. So I am trying to really minimise querys. Also I am going to be increasing the number of dynamic sites I have on the host so the problem will only get worse. So I am effectively creating a cache copy of my dynamic pages. So when a page is opened on my site the code checks the cached pages update time and then ideally checks the table update time and if necessary creates a new cache page if not it uses the existing cache copy page. I know its crude but it does cut down queries a lot. At the moment I have just used a dummy file and recreate it when any data is added to the database. It works but I always like to try and learn new things as I know my knowledge is not as good as it should be