One of the advanced features of PostgreSQL is the NOTIFY
and LISTEN
functionality. These features enable real-time communication between databases and applications. Modern web applications that requires event-driven behavoir and real-time updates will benefit from this.
Combining these features with Ruby on Rails can create powerful real-time applications with minimum overhead.
The NOTIFY
and LISTEN
features allows a database session to send and receive asynchoronous messages. With NOTIFY
, a session broadcasts a message on a specific channel. LISTEN
allows other sessions to subscribe to those messages. The mechanishm enables real-time communication and thus reducing the need for continous polling of the database.