If you use a primary key int id that's set to auto_increment you can do a SELECT query that orders by id in reverse, limiting to the last 6 results like so (I admit you'll need something to call this query repeatedly - like a perl/php script called by a cron job - hence the 'static' nature): SELECT * FROM db.table ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 0,6; Other than that then you can use triggers on row inserts or updates...but I'm also investigating this one. A trigger looks like a better solution :) If you go the cron way you'll need to have a way to track the last row that was worked on - probably store the row id in another field or in a variable in the script - and since you can call scripts in 60sec intervals from cron you can have a loop in the script that runs and sleeps on each iteration for about 1k milliseconds (or less)...hope you get the drift...