If you are looking at just a last-updated information for any rows in the database (say on a given table), then it really isn't even dependent on the database... it would more be business rules you would build into your applications.
It is uncleare if you are talking about a last update for a given record, or a last update of any records. If it is of a given record, then I agree completely with wstuph, you need that data to be stored with each row in the database. How you go about doing that depends on which database you are using... if it is one of the more sophisticated databases, you would capture the last udate date with a trigger on the data table so that when a record is updated, it stores the last update date of that record, then you would just display that column on the page when the record was displayed. In the case of MS access (the only databaes I know that doesn't support triggers), you would have to build the logic into the application to update the last update date.
If it is really just capturing the last update date of any record in a table, then there are more ways to implement it, depending on the requirements. You could still use a trigger approach, and just store a last update date into another table, designed to hold this data. Keep in mind that it will force all updates to any row in the database table to always funnel down to that one row and that will limit the concurrancy of an extremely busy application. You could also store this on the web-server side to, and have a file that you update, then take the last modified date of the file.... this wouldn't capture direct database updates though.
No matter what though, if you are going to display this data, the display is depended on the web-application to pick up the data from whereever it is being stored, and to display it.
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by: wstuphPosted on 2006-04-18 at 12:52:59ID: 16481618
Short answer: yes
Long answer: Yes, but the specifics depend on how you're passing data to the webpage, how the webpage is passing data to the access database, if the DB is getting information elsewhere, what the table structures look like, etc.
You need to add a "LastUpdated" field somewhere in your database, then have the webpage query that data and display it. Without knowing how your webpage works it's nearly impossible to give you more information about how to go about it.