I've been pondering that is quite common to have static or very close to static tables (and for sure that don't update that often). If you don't have some kind of application server that can notice such an update (From app side). You have not much better choice to just poll the changes/refresh the data.
Does any database/standard have such mechanism in DB-Engine level that application could get some kind of notifications of updates. sure you can do optimizations to make polling lighter operation, but more there are clients, more costly it'll becomes -Tee-
