LISTEN registers the current PostgreSQL backend as a listener on the notify condition name.
Whenever the command NOTIFY name is invoked, either by this backend or another one connected to the same database, all the backends currently listening on that notify condition are notified, and each will in turn notify its connected frontend application. See the discussion of NOTIFY for more information.
A backend can be unregistered for a given notify condition with the UNLISTEN command. Also, a backend's listen registrations are automatically cleared when the backend process exits.
The method a frontend application must use to detect notify
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 routine
PQnotifies to find out whether any
notify 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
library you are using for more details.
NOTIFY contains a more extensive discussion of the use of LISTEN and NOTIFY.
name can be any string valid as a name; it need not correspond to the name of any actual table. If notifyname is enclosed in double-quotes, it need not even be a syntactically valid name, but can be any string up to 63 characters long.
In some previous releases of PostgreSQL, name had to be enclosed in double-quotes when it did not correspond to any existing table name, even if syntactically valid as a name. That is no longer required.