LISTEN Carefully: How NOTIFY Can Trip Up Your Database | POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2026
Postgres NOTIFY in triggers forces accidental serialization via a global pg_database lock, stalling concurrent commits.
“Postgres treats LISTEN/NOTIFY like a globally serialized queue of notifications”
A pgEdge engineer recounts how using Postgres NOTIFY inside triggers caused every committing transaction to contend for an access-exclusive lock on the global pg_database catalog, serializing concurrent work and triggering lock-timeout cascades under high traffic. It is a useful Postgres engineering lesson but contains no meaningful AI industry signal for an AI-focused newsletter.