Statement level triggers

Vincenzo Romano wrote:

Hi all.

What'd be the behavior of a (plpgsql) trigger function when called as
a statement level trigger?
Let's say that a statement will involve more than one row.
The documentation (v8.4.2, "35.1. Overview of Trigger Behavior") says:

"Statement-level triggers do not currently have any way to examine the
individual row(s) modified by the statement."

It means you don't have NEW or OLD record-variables. You can still
perform any queries you need to on the table affected and any other
tables of interest.

I find statement-level triggers to be useful mostly for sanity-checking.
I'll have an AFTER statement level trigger verify a certain invariant on
a table - like a table-level CHECK (as opposed to row-level CHECK).

--
Craig Ringer

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What'd be the behavior of a (plpgsql) trigger function when called as
a statement level trigger?
Let's say that a statement will involve more than one row.
The documentation (v8.4.2, "35.1. Overview of Trigger Behavior") says:

"Statement-level triggers do not currently have any way to examine the
individual row(s) modied by the statement."

It's not clear what you are asking, but statement-level triggers imply
that the actual data (e.g. row changes) are not relevant (or visible)
to the trigger. Thus, it's more of "something" has changed trigger, rather
than a row-level "this stuff" has changed trigger. For example, Bucardo
uses both kinds: the row-level triggers keep track of what rows have
changed, and statement-level triggers which send a NOTIFY to let the
Bucardo daemon know that the table has changed.

- --
Greg Sabino Mullane greg@turnstep.com
End Point Corporation http://www.endpoint.com/
PGP Key: 0x14964AC8 201001200828
http://biglumber.com/x/web?pk=2529DF6AB8F79407E94445B4BC9B906714964AC8
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In article <4B5702B9.50706@postnewspapers.com.au>,
Craig Ringer <craig@postnewspapers.com.au> writes:

What'd be the behavior of a (plpgsql) trigger function when called as
a statement level trigger?
Let's say that a statement will involve more than one row.
The documentation (v8.4.2, "35.1. Overview of Trigger Behavior") says:

"Statement-level triggers do not currently have any way to examine the
individual row(s) modified by the statement."

It means you don't have NEW or OLD record-variables.

Other databases have NEW and/or OLD pseudo-tables for that. My
suggestion about implementing that got turned down because, without a
primary key, you can't say which NEW and OLD rows belong to each
other.

Since tables often have a primary key I still think that this would be
an addition making statement-level triggers much more useful than they
are now.