periodic database purge - advice needed

EyeSight

Hi i am currently creating a java server which stores user data in a mysql database. I would like to keep data somewhat fresh, so i was hoping that every 5 minutes, to have a thread poll the database, and remove any data from users which have been inactive in the past 5 minutes or so

i just wondering what (experienced)peoples opinions are on an efficient way to do this. my idea was to have the thread sleep for 5 minutes before polling the DB again. is it possible to have a script in PL\SQL run every 5 minutes to do this?

also will there be a contention issue for the database, i.e. what if the server is inputting data at the exact same time the purging thread is deleting data from the same table

i am fairly good with java, however as you may notice i lack real world experience, so i'm open to all opinions

lynchie

Possibilities are

java.util.concurrent.ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor
java.util.Timer

or use something more featured such as Quartz

Malice

Is there a particular reason why you need to remove data at such short intervals? Could you read the user from the database, store it somewhere e.g. in a HTTP session and then wipe that instead?