I'll save the full rant for my blog :), but wanted to submit this documentation
patch for this listen gotcha that's been bugging me for a while. I'd like
to see LISTEN and NOTIFY changed to use a simple text string, but until then,
I think we should probably warn about the chopping off of the left-hand part.
Index: listen.sgml
===================================================================
RCS file: /projects/cvsroot/pgsql/doc/src/sgml/ref/listen.sgml,v
retrieving revision 1.22
diff -c -r1.22 listen.sgml
*** listen.sgml 16 Sep 2006 00:30:19 -0000 1.22
--- listen.sgml 20 Feb 2007 18:18:15 -0000
***************
*** 33,38 ****
--- 33,44 ----
class="PARAMETER">name</replaceable>.
If the current session is already registered as a listener for
this notification condition, nothing is done.
+ Note that because <replaceable class="PARAMETER">name</replaceable>
+ is a relation name, all but the last section will be dropped if the
+ name has any dots in it: LISTEN employee, LISTEN newyork.employee,
+ and LISTEN unitedstates.newyork.employee all register the name
+ employee. Users needing to separate words should use an underscore
+ instead of a dot.
</para>
<para>
---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
