LISTEN(7)

🌸 NAME 🌸

okay bestie, welcome to the LISTEN(7) page — it’s the PostgreSQL manual page for LISTEN, aka the command to listen for a notification. No cap, it’s giving group-chat energy for your database. 💅✨

✨ 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 — literally zero extra drama. 🫶

Whenever the command NOTIFY channel is invoked — either by this session or by 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. It’s a relay race, but make it database events. 🏃‍♀️💨

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, so no cleanup era required. ✨

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. iykyk 💅

🎀 PARAMETERS 🎀

• channel — Name of a notification channel (any identifier). That’s the whole parameter, slay.

🦋 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. Rollback said “not today,” and the listen set stays exactly as it was. 😭

A transaction that has executed LISTEN cannot be prepared for two-phase commit. Important caveat, no cap.

Okay, race-condition story time: there is a race condition when first setting up a listening session. If concurrently-committing transactions are sending notify events, exactly which of those will the newly listening session receive? The answer is that the session will receive all events committed after an instant during the transaction's commit step. But that is slightly later than any database state that the transaction could have observed in queries. This leads to the following rule for using LISTEN: first execute (and commit!) that command, then in a new transaction inspect the database state as needed by the application logic, then rely on notifications to find out about subsequent changes to the database state. The first few received notifications might refer to updates already observed in the initial database inspection, but this is usually harmless. 🫶

NOTIFY(7) contains a more extensive discussion of the use of LISTEN and NOTIFY.

🌈 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. Bestie, it’s a PostgreSQL original. 💅

👑 SEE ALSO 👑

• NOTIFY(7)
• UNLISTEN(7)

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✨ PostgreSQL 16.15 · 2026 · that’s the LISTEN(7) page, bestie — go forth and get notified 💖🦋✨