PostgreSQL supports asynchronous notification via the LISTEN and NOTIFY commands. A backend registers its interest in a particular notification condition with the LISTEN command. All backends that are listening on a particular condition will be notified asynchronously when a NOTIFY of that name is executed by another backend. No additional information is passed from the notifier to the listener. Thus, typically, any actual data that needs to be communicated is transferred through a relation.
libpq++ applications are
notified whenever a connected backend has received an
asynchronous notification. However, the communication from the
backend to the frontend is not asynchronous. The libpq++ application must poll the backend to
see if there is any pending notification information. After the
execution of a command, a frontend may call PgDatabase::Notifies to see if any notification
data is currently available from the backend. PgDatabase::Notifies returns the notification
from a list of unhandled notifications from the backend. The
function returns NULL if there are no
pending notifications from the backend. PgDatabase::Notifies behaves like the popping
of a stack. Once a notification is returned from PgDatabase::Notifies, it is considered handled
and will be removed from the list of notifications.
PgDatabase::Notifies
retrieves pending notifications from the server.
PGnotify* PgDatabase::Notifies()
The second sample program gives an example of the use of asynchronous notification.