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.

>>23
How do you keep track of which query is stored where, and what they are for, etc? Doesn't it become a huge maze after a while? In my job we have literally thousands of views and stored procedures (and still most of the queries are hard-coded in the software - at least for the older applications), and although we applied some form of naming conventions, it has become really confusing after all this time.

My application currently does have a connection pooling class, and the classes representing table data are generated by a tool I wrote. It all works fine as it is, but I was hoping to find a more elegant way of doing it. I like what I've seen of Hibernate so far, but >>19 put me off it. I'm not necessarily looking for an ORM solution though. Just wanted to get some thoughts from others :)