CREATE TRIGGER(7)

NAME
CREATE_TRIGGER - define a new trigger

SYNOPSIS

CREATE [ CONSTRAINT ] TRIGGER name { BEFORE | AFTER | INSTEAD OF } { event [ OR ... ] }
    ON table
    [ FROM referenced_table_name ]
    { NOT DEFERRABLE | [ DEFERRABLE ] { INITIALLY IMMEDIATE | INITIALLY DEFERRED } }
    [ FOR [ EACH ] { ROW | STATEMENT } ]
    [ WHEN ( condition ) ]
    EXECUTE PROCEDURE function_name ( arguments )
where event can be one of:
    INSERT
    UPDATE [ OF column_name [, ... ] ]
    DELETE
    TRUNCATE

DESCRIPTION

CREATE TRIGGER creates a new trigger. The trigger will be associated with the specified table or view and will execute the specified function function_name when certain events occur.

The trigger can be specified to fire before the operation is attempted on a row (before constraints are checked and the INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE is attempted); or after the operation has completed (after constraints are checked and the INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE has completed); or instead of the operation (in the case of inserts, updates or deletes on a view). If the trigger fires before or instead of the event, the trigger can skip the operation for the current row, or change the row being inserted (for INSERT and UPDATE operations only). If the trigger fires after the event, all changes, including the effects of other triggers, are “visible” to the trigger.

A trigger that is marked FOR EACH ROW is called once for every row that the operation modifies. For example, a DELETE that affects 10 rows will cause any ON DELETE triggers on the target relation to be called 10 separate times, once for each deleted row. In contrast, a trigger that is marked FOR EACH STATEMENT only executes once for any given operation, regardless of how many rows it modifies (in particular, an operation that modifies zero rows will still result in the execution of any applicable FOR EACH STATEMENT triggers).

Triggers that are specified to fire INSTEAD OF the trigger event must be marked FOR EACH ROW, and can only be defined on views. BEFORE and AFTER triggers on a view must be marked as FOR EACH STATEMENT.

In addition, triggers may be defined to fire for TRUNCATE, though only FOR EACH STATEMENT.

The following table summarizes which types of triggers may be used on tables and views:
When | Event | Row-level | Statement-level
BEFORE | INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE | Tables | Tables and views
 | TRUNCATE | — | Tables
AFTER | INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE | Tables | Tables and views
 | TRUNCATE | — | Tables
INSTEAD OF | INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE | Views | —
 | TRUNCATE | — | —

Also, a trigger definition can specify a Boolean WHEN condition, which will be tested to see whether the trigger should be fired. In row-level triggers the WHEN condition can examine the old and/or new values of columns of the row. Statement-level triggers can also have WHEN conditions, although the feature is not so useful for them since the condition cannot refer to any values in the table.

If multiple triggers of the same kind are defined for the same event, they will be fired in alphabetical order by name.

When the CONSTRAINT option is specified, this command creates a constraint trigger. This is the same as a regular trigger except that the timing of the trigger firing can be adjusted using SET CONSTRAINTS (SET_CONSTRAINTS(7)). Constraint triggers must be AFTER ROW triggers. They can be fired either at the end of the statement causing the triggering event, or at the end of the containing transaction; in the latter case they are said to be deferred. A pending deferred-trigger firing can also be forced to happen immediately by using SET CONSTRAINTS. Constraint triggers are expected to raise an exception when the constraints they implement are violated.

SELECT does not modify any rows so you cannot create SELECT triggers. Rules and views are more appropriate in such cases.

Refer to Chapter 36, Triggers, in the documentation for more information about triggers.

PARAMETERS

name
    The name to give the new trigger. This must be distinct from the name of any other trigger for the same table. The name cannot be schema-qualified — the trigger inherits the schema of its table. For a constraint trigger, this is also the name to use when modifying the trigger's behavior using SET CONSTRAINTS.

BEFORE, AFTER, INSTEAD OF
    Determines whether the function is called before, after, or instead of the event. A constraint trigger can only be specified as AFTER.

event
    One of INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, or TRUNCATE; this specifies the event that will fire the trigger. Multiple events can be specified using OR.

    For UPDATE events, it is possible to specify a list of columns using this syntax:

        UPDATE OF column_name1 [, column_name2 ... ]

    The trigger will only fire if at least one of the listed columns is mentioned as a target of the UPDATE command.

    INSTEAD OF UPDATE events do not support lists of columns.

table
    The name (optionally schema-qualified) of the table or view the trigger is for.

referenced_table_name
    The (possibly schema-qualified) name of another table referenced by the constraint. This option is used for foreign-key constraints and is not recommended for general use. This can only be specified for constraint triggers.

DEFERRABLE, NOT DEFERRABLE, INITIALLY IMMEDIATE, INITIALLY DEFERRED
    The default timing of the trigger. See the CREATE TABLE (CREATE_TABLE(7)) documentation for details of these constraint options. This can only be specified for constraint triggers.

FOR EACH ROW, FOR EACH STATEMENT
    This specifies whether the trigger procedure should be fired once for every row affected by the trigger event, or just once per SQL statement. If neither is specified, FOR EACH STATEMENT is the default. Constraint triggers can only be specified FOR EACH ROW.

condition
    A Boolean expression that determines whether the trigger function will actually be executed. If WHEN is specified, the function will only be called if the condition returns true. In FOR EACH ROW triggers, the WHEN condition can refer to columns of the old and/or new row values by writing OLD.column_name or NEW.column_name respectively. Of course, INSERT triggers cannot refer to OLD and DELETE triggers cannot refer to NEW.

    INSTEAD OF triggers do not support WHEN conditions.

    Currently, WHEN expressions cannot contain subqueries.

    Note that for constraint triggers, evaluation of the WHEN condition is not deferred, but occurs immediately after the row update operation is performed. If the condition does not evaluate to true then the trigger is not queued for deferred execution.

function_name
    A user-supplied function that is declared as taking no arguments and returning type trigger, which is executed when the trigger fires.

arguments
    An optional comma-separated list of arguments to be provided to the function when the trigger is executed. The arguments are literal string constants. Simple names and numeric constants can be written here, too, but they will all be converted to strings. Please check the description of the implementation language of the trigger function to find out how these arguments can be accessed within the function; it might be different from normal function arguments.

NOTES

To create a trigger on a table, the user must have the TRIGGER privilege on the table.

Use DROP TRIGGER (DROP_TRIGGER(7)) to remove a trigger.

A column-specific trigger (one defined using the UPDATE OF column_name syntax) will fire when any of its columns are listed as targets in the UPDATE command's SET list. It is possible for a column's value to change even when the trigger is not fired, because changes made to the row's contents by BEFORE UPDATE triggers are not considered. Conversely, a command such as UPDATE ... SET x = x ... will fire a trigger on column x, even though the column's value did not change.

In a BEFORE trigger, the WHEN condition is evaluated just before the function is or would be executed, so using WHEN is not materially different from testing the same condition at the beginning of the trigger function. Note in particular that the NEW row seen by the condition is the current value, as possibly modified by earlier triggers. Also, a BEFORE trigger's WHEN condition is not allowed to examine the system columns of the NEW row (such as oid), because those won't have been set yet.

In an AFTER trigger, the WHEN condition is evaluated just after the row update occurs, and it determines whether an event is queued to fire the trigger at the end of statement. So when an AFTER trigger's WHEN condition does not return true, it is not necessary to queue an event nor to re-fetch the row at end of statement. This can result in significant speedups in statements that modify many rows, if the trigger only needs to be fired for a few of the rows.

In PostgreSQL versions before 7.3, it was necessary to declare trigger functions as returning the placeholder type opaque, rather than trigger. To support loading of old dump files, CREATE TRIGGER will accept a function declared as returning opaque, but it will issue a notice and change the function's declared return type to trigger.

EXAMPLES

Execute the function check_account_update whenever a row of the table accounts is about to be updated:

    CREATE TRIGGER check_update
        BEFORE UPDATE ON accounts
        FOR EACH ROW
        EXECUTE PROCEDURE check_account_update();

The same, but only execute the function if column balance is specified as a target in the UPDATE command:

    CREATE TRIGGER check_update
        BEFORE UPDATE OF balance ON accounts
        FOR EACH ROW
        EXECUTE PROCEDURE check_account_update();

This form only executes the function if column balance has in fact changed value:

    CREATE TRIGGER check_update
        BEFORE UPDATE ON accounts
        FOR EACH ROW
        WHEN (OLD.balance IS DISTINCT FROM NEW.balance)
        EXECUTE PROCEDURE check_account_update();

Call a function to log updates of accounts, but only if something changed:

    CREATE TRIGGER log_update
        AFTER UPDATE ON accounts
        FOR EACH ROW
        WHEN (OLD.* IS DISTINCT FROM NEW.*)
        EXECUTE PROCEDURE log_account_update();

Execute the function view_insert_row for each row to insert rows into the tables underlying a view:

    CREATE TRIGGER view_insert
        INSTEAD OF INSERT ON my_view
        FOR EACH ROW
        EXECUTE PROCEDURE view_insert_row();

Section 36.4, “A Complete Trigger Example”, in the documentation contains a complete example of a trigger function written in C.

COMPATIBILITY

The CREATE TRIGGER statement in PostgreSQL implements a subset of the SQL standard. The following functionality is currently missing:

    • SQL allows you to define aliases for the “old” and “new” rows or tables for use in the definition of the triggered action (e.g., CREATE TRIGGER ... ON tablename REFERENCING OLD ROW AS somename NEW ROW AS othername ...). Since PostgreSQL allows trigger procedures to be written in any number of user-defined languages, access to the data is handled in a language-specific way.

    • PostgreSQL only allows the execution of a user-defined function for the triggered action. The standard allows the execution of a number of other SQL commands, such as CREATE TABLE, as the triggered action. This limitation is not hard to work around by creating a user-defined function that executes the desired commands.

SQL specifies that multiple triggers should be fired in time-of-creation order. PostgreSQL uses name order, which was judged to be more convenient.

SQL specifies that BEFORE DELETE triggers on cascaded deletes fire after the cascaded DELETE completes. The PostgreSQL behavior is for BEFORE DELETE to always fire before the delete action, even a cascading one. This is considered more consistent. There is also nonstandard behavior if BEFORE triggers modify rows or prevent updates during an update that is caused by a referential action. This can lead to constraint violations or stored data that does not honor the referential constraint.

The ability to specify multiple actions for a single trigger using OR is a PostgreSQL extension of the SQL standard.

The ability to fire triggers for TRUNCATE is a PostgreSQL extension of the SQL standard, as is the ability to define statement-level triggers on views.

CREATE CONSTRAINT TRIGGER is a PostgreSQL extension of the SQL standard.

SEE ALSO
CREATE FUNCTION (CREATE_FUNCTION(7)), ALTER TRIGGER (ALTER_TRIGGER(7)), DROP TRIGGER (DROP_TRIGGER(7)), SET CONSTRAINTS (SET_CONSTRAINTS(7))