I'm trying to check whether Hibernate would support the following scenario :-

I have a standard application that I'm using Hibernate with to manage the persistence layer (a MySQL database). So all CRUD operations from my application are done via Hibernate. However, there are other clients to the database (e.g. users using an SQL query tool session, .NET clients etc).

Is there any way to be alerted to changes in the database (e.g. a new row written via a native MySQL query) at the Hibernate layer ? I've started to read up on listeners but any advice much appreciated !

no the database is not going to raise any event to Hibernate, the built-in listeners are meant to listen to hibernate events not to external changes.