CREATE TRIGGER name { BEFORE | AFTER } { event [ OR ... ] }
ON table [ FOR [ EACH ] { ROW | STATEMENT } ]
EXECUTE PROCEDURE funcname ( arguments )
CREATE TRIGGER creates a new trigger. The trigger will be associated with the specified table and will execute the specified function func when certain events occur.
The trigger can be specified to fire either before 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). If the trigger fires before the event, the trigger may 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 last insertion, update, or deletion, 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).
If multiple triggers of the same kind are defined for the same event, they will be fired in alphabetical order by name.
SELECT does not modify any rows so you can not create SELECT triggers. Rules and views are more appropriate in such cases.
Refer to the chapter called ``Triggers'' in the documentation for more information about triggers.
To create a trigger on a table, the user must have the TRIGGER privilege on the table.
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.
Use DROP TRIGGER [drop_trigger(7)] to remove a trigger.
The chapter called ``Triggers'' in the documentation contains a complete example.
The CREATE TRIGGER statement in PostgreSQL implements a subset of the SQL99 standard. (There are no provisions for triggers in SQL92.) The following functionality is missing:
SQL99 specifies that multiple triggers should be fired in time-of-creation order. PostgreSQL uses name order, which was judged more convenient to work with.
The ability to specify multiple actions for a single trigger using OR is a PostgreSQL extension of the SQL standard.