Practical PostgreSQL

Unlisten

Stops the backend process from listening for a notification event.

Synopsis

UNLISTEN { notifyname | * }

Examples

notifyname

The name of the NOTIFY condition you wish to stop listening for.

*

Passing the asterisk symbol (*) as the name of the notify condition will stop the backend from listening for any currently defined conditions.

Results

UNLISTEN

The message returned when a UNLISTEN command is completed successfully.

Description

Use the UNLISTEN command to unregister a current NOTIFY registration matching the notify condition specified by notifyname. Alternatively, you can use the wildcard symbol (*) to remove all listener registrations for the current session. When a backend shuts down it will automatically issue UNLISTEN * to remove all listener registrations.

Note

If you are interested in seeing all of the notification events being listened for, you may query the relname column from the pg_listener system table.

More information about using the NOTIFY and LISTEN commands (which work together to form the simple interprocess communication or IPC system) can be found by referring to the reference entry titled “NOTIFY.”

Example

The following example checks all notifications being listened for, and subsequently stops the backend process from listening for the publisher_update event:

booktown=# SELECT relname FROM pg_listener; relname ------------------ publisher_update publisher_delete ...