Re: Notify argument?

Neil Conway wrote:
>
> > I am curious, why does notify not support a string argument of some kind, to
> > pass to the other connections? It seems it would be a little more useful.
> Actually, I think that Oracle's implementation of this feature actually
> allows for a user-specified string argument.

Commercial Ingres allowed one to specify a string also. I'm guessing
that the feature was not implemented in PostgreSQL *not* because there
is some good database design reason to leave it out, but rather because
someone did not bother to put it in.

> AFAICT it shouldn't be too difficult. However, there is a note in the
> TODO list referring to breaking backwards compatability with the
> "pgNotify API". Exactly how backwards compatible do we need to be?

imho not much in this case (though of course we may find a way to be
very compatible when someone actually implements it). I had found the
equivalent feature very useful when building a large data handling
system a few years ago, and I'd think that it would be useful in
PostgreSQL also. Comments?

- Thomas