Database programming

G'day /prog/

I'm writing a java application with a mysql db backend (indeed, performance is not what I'm after), but I'm struggling a bit. How does one go about saving data? Do you execute an update query whenever a class representing a table is changed, or would there be an interval? Or am I going about this entirely wrong?
Your advice will be greatly appreciated.

>>20
Look, you either have this horrible ``low-level'' stuff you seem to be so afraid of, or you use some sort of framework for abstracting database connections. However, most of these will suck as soon as you bring in some joins and other more complicated relations. Performance will go down if your data starts to exceed a certain amount of rows unless you write your queries yourself.