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NAME
CREATE_TRIGGER - define a new trigger
SYNOPSIS
CREATE [ CONSTRAINT ] TRIGGER name { BEFORE | AFTER | INSTEAD OF } { event [ OR ... ] }
ON table_name
[ FROM referenced_table_name ]
[ NOT DEFERRABLE | [ DEFERRABLE ] [ INITIALLY IMMEDIATE | INITIALLY DEFERRED ] ]
[ REFERENCING { { OLD | NEW } TABLE [ AS ] transition_relation_name } [ ... ] ]
[ FOR [ EACH ] { ROW | STATEMENT } ]
[ WHEN ( condition ) ]
EXECUTE { FUNCTION | 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, view, or foreign table and will execute the specified function function_name when
certain operations are performed on that table.
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, views, and
foreign tables:
┌───────────┬──────────────────────┬────────────────────┬────────────────────┐
│When │ Event │ Row-level │ Statement-level │
├───────────┼──────────────────────┼────────────────────┼────────────────────┤
│ │ INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE │ Tables and foreign │ Tables, views, and │
│ BEFORE │ │ tables │ foreign tables │
│ ├──────────────────────┼────────────────────┼────────────────────┤
│ │ TRUNCATE │ — │ Tables │
├───────────┼──────────────────────┼────────────────────┼────────────────────┤
│ │ INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE │ Tables and foreign │ Tables, views, and │
│ AFTER │ │ tables │ foreign tables │
│ ├──────────────────────┼────────────────────┼────────────────────┤
│ │ TRUNCATE │ — │ Tables │
├───────────┼──────────────────────┼────────────────────┼────────────────────┤
│ │ INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE │ Views │ — │
│INSTEAD OF ├──────────────────────┼────────────────────┼────────────────────┤
│ │ 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 on plain tables (not foreign tables). 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.
The REFERENCING option enables collection of transition relations, which are row sets that
include all of the rows inserted, deleted, or modified by the current SQL statement. This
feature lets the trigger see a global view of what the statement did, not just one row at
a time. This option is only allowed for an AFTER trigger that is not a constraint trigger;
also, if the trigger is an UPDATE trigger, it must not specify a column_name list. OLD
TABLE may only be specified once, and only for a trigger that can fire on UPDATE or
DELETE; it creates a transition relation containing the before-images of all rows updated
or deleted by the statement. Similarly, NEW TABLE may only be specified once, and only for
a trigger that can fire on UPDATE or INSERT; it creates a transition relation containing
the after-images of all rows updated or inserted by the statement.
SELECT does not modify any rows so you cannot create SELECT triggers. Rules and views may
provide workable solutions to problems that seem to need SELECT triggers.
Refer to Chapter 38 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, except when transition
relations are requested.
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 or if one of the listed columns is a generated column
that depends on a column that is the target of the UPDATE.
INSTEAD OF UPDATE events do not allow a list of columns. A column list cannot be
specified when requesting transition relations, either.
table_name
The name (optionally schema-qualified) of the table, view, or foreign table 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.
REFERENCING
This keyword immediately precedes the declaration of one or two relation names that
provide access to the transition relations of the triggering statement.
OLD TABLE
NEW TABLE
This clause indicates whether the following relation name is for the before-image
transition relation or the after-image transition relation.
transition_relation_name
The (unqualified) name to be used within the trigger for this transition relation.
FOR EACH ROW
FOR EACH STATEMENT
This specifies whether the trigger function 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.
In the syntax of CREATE TRIGGER, the keywords FUNCTION and PROCEDURE are equivalent,
but the referenced function must in any case be a function, not a procedure. The use
of the keyword PROCEDURE here is historical and deprecated.
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. The
user must also have EXECUTE privilege on the trigger function.
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.
There are a few built-in trigger functions that can be used to solve common problems
without having to write your own trigger code; see Section 9.27.
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 ctid), 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 some cases it is possible for a single SQL command to fire more than one kind of
trigger. For instance an INSERT with an ON CONFLICT DO UPDATE clause may cause both insert
and update operations, so it will fire both kinds of triggers as needed. The transition
relations supplied to triggers are specific to their event type; thus an INSERT trigger
will see only the inserted rows, while an UPDATE trigger will see only the updated rows.
Row updates or deletions caused by foreign-key enforcement actions, such as ON UPDATE
CASCADE or ON DELETE SET NULL, are treated as part of the SQL command that caused them
(note that such actions are never deferred). Relevant triggers on the affected table will
be fired, so that this provides another way in which a SQL command might fire triggers not
directly matching its type. In simple cases, triggers that request transition relations
will see all changes caused in their table by a single original SQL command as a single
transition relation. However, there are cases in which the presence of an AFTER ROW
trigger that requests transition relations will cause the foreign-key enforcement actions
triggered by a single SQL command to be split into multiple steps, each with its own
transition relation(s). In such cases, any statement-level triggers that are present will
be fired once per creation of a transition relation set, ensuring that the triggers see
each affected row in a transition relation once and only once.
Statement-level triggers on a view are fired only if the action on the view is handled by
a row-level INSTEAD OF trigger. If the action is handled by an INSTEAD rule, then whatever
statements are emitted by the rule are executed in place of the original statement naming
the view, so that the triggers that will be fired are those on tables named in the
replacement statements. Similarly, if the view is automatically updatable, then the action
is handled by automatically rewriting the statement into an action on the view's base
table, so that the base table's statement-level triggers are the ones that are fired.
Creating a row-level trigger on a partitioned table will cause identical triggers to be
created in all its existing partitions; and any partitions created or attached later will
contain an identical trigger, too. If the partition is detached from its parent, the
trigger is removed. Triggers on partitioned tables may only be AFTER.
Modifying a partitioned table or a table with inheritance children fires statement-level
triggers attached to the explicitly named table, but not statement-level triggers for its
partitions or child tables. In contrast, row-level triggers are fired on the rows in
affected partitions or child tables, even if they are not explicitly named in the query.
If a statement-level trigger has been defined with transition relations named by a
REFERENCING clause, then before and after images of rows are visible from all affected
partitions or child tables. In the case of inheritance children, the row images include
only columns that are present in the table that the trigger is attached to. Currently,
row-level triggers with transition relations cannot be defined on partitions or
inheritance child tables.
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 FUNCTION 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 FUNCTION 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 FUNCTION 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 FUNCTION 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 FUNCTION view_insert_row();
Execute the function check_transfer_balances_to_zero for each statement to confirm that
the transfer rows offset to a net of zero:
CREATE TRIGGER transfer_insert
AFTER INSERT ON transfer
REFERENCING NEW TABLE AS inserted
FOR EACH STATEMENT
EXECUTE FUNCTION check_transfer_balances_to_zero();
Execute the function check_matching_pairs for each row to confirm that changes are made to
matching pairs at the same time (by the same statement):
CREATE TRIGGER paired_items_update
AFTER UPDATE ON paired_items
REFERENCING NEW TABLE AS newtab OLD TABLE AS oldtab
FOR EACH ROW
EXECUTE FUNCTION check_matching_pairs();
Section 38.4 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 functionalities are currently missing:
• While transition table names for AFTER triggers are specified using the REFERENCING
clause in the standard way, the row variables used in FOR EACH ROW triggers may not be
specified in a REFERENCING clause. They are available in a manner that is dependent on
the language in which the trigger function is written, but is fixed for any one
language. Some languages effectively behave as though there is a REFERENCING clause
containing OLD ROW AS OLD NEW ROW AS NEW.
• The standard allows transition tables to be used with column-specific UPDATE triggers,
but then the set of rows that should be visible in the transition tables depends on
the trigger's column list. This is not currently implemented by PostgreSQL.
• 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
ALTER TRIGGER (ALTER_TRIGGER(7)), DROP TRIGGER (DROP_TRIGGER(7)), CREATE FUNCTION
(CREATE_FUNCTION(7)), SET CONSTRAINTS (SET_CONSTRAINTS(7))