LISTEN(7)

💖 LISTEN(7) — listen for a notification 💖

🌸 NAME 🌸

LISTEN — listen for a notification. That's the whole assignment, bestie. 💅

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

LISTEN channel

Short, sweet, and ready to receive. ✨

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

Okay so 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 — no duplicate registration, no extra sparkle. 🎀

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 giving group chat, but for sessions. 💬✨

A session can be unregistered for a given notification channel with the UNLISTEN command. And a session's listen registrations are automatically cleared when the session ends. Clean exit, no lingering subscriptions. 🧹

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: check your interface docs, not a random group chat. 📚

🎀 PARAMETERS 🎀

• channel — name of a notification channel (any identifier). Pick an identifier, any identifier. 🎀

💅 NOTES 💅

• LISTEN takes effect at transaction commit. Commit is the moment it becomes real. ✨
• If LISTEN or UNLISTEN is executed within a transaction that later rolls back, the set of notification channels being listened to is unchanged. Rollback says "never mind," and the listener list stays exactly as it was. ↩️
• A transaction that has executed LISTEN cannot be prepared for two-phase commit. No two-phase prep for that transaction, periodt. 🚫
• 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. Bestie, commit first, inspect second, then let the notifications do their thing. 🦋
• NOTIFY(7) contains a more extensive discussion of the use of LISTEN and NOTIFY. Go read that one too; it's the extended lore. 📖

🦋 EXAMPLES 🦋

Configure and execute a listen/notify sequence from psql:

LISTEN virtual;
NOTIFY virtual;
Asynchronous notification "virtual" received from server process with PID 8448.

That's the sequence: listen, notify, and the async notification output with PID 8448. 🦋

🌈 COMPATIBILITY 🌈

There is no LISTEN statement in the SQL standard. The SQL standard simply did not include this one. 💀

👑 SEE ALSO 👑

• NOTIFY(7)
• UNLISTEN(7)
• max_notify_queue_pages

💖 xoxo, sourced from PostgreSQL 17.11 docs, dated 2026, page LISTEN(7) — go listen to your channels, bestie 💖