LISTEN
LISTEN — listen for a notification
Synopsis
LISTEN channel
Description
LISTEN
registers the current session as a listener on the notification channel named channel
. If the current session is already registered as a listener for this notification channel, nothing is done.
Whenever the command NOTIFY
is invoked, either by this session or another one connected to the same database, all the sessions currently listening on that notification channel are notified, and each will in turn notify its connected client application. channel
A session can be unregistered for a given notification channel with the UNLISTEN
command. A session's listen registrations are automatically cleared when the session ends.
The method a client application must use to detect notification events depends on which PostgreSQL application programming interface it uses. With the libpq library, the application issues LISTEN
as an ordinary SQL command, and then must periodically call the function PQnotifies
to find out whether any notification events have been received. Other interfaces such as libpgtcl provide higher-level methods for handling notify events; indeed, with libpgtcl the application programmer should not even issue LISTEN
or UNLISTEN
directly. See the documentation for the interface you are using for more details.
NOTIFY contains a more extensive discussion of the use of LISTEN
and NOTIFY
.
Parameters
channel
Name of a notification channel (any identifier).
Notes
LISTEN
takes effect at transaction commit. If LISTEN
or UNLISTEN
is executed within a transaction that later rolls back, the set of notification channels being listened to is unchanged.
A transaction that has executed LISTEN
cannot be prepared for two-phase commit.
Examples
Configure and execute a listen/notify sequence from psql:
LISTEN virtual; NOTIFY virtual; Asynchronous notification "virtual" received from server process with PID 8448.
Compatibility
There is no LISTEN
statement in the SQL standard.