I've been maintaining a large (and quite old) in-play gambling system for the past six months that uses Postgres triggers and pg_notify [1] as the core mechanis

I've been maintaining a large (and quite old) in-play gambling system for the past six months that uses Postgres triggers and pg_notify [1] as the core mechanism for broadcasting websocket frames to SPA clients. Hilariously, it turned out the system was violating a recommendation in the Postgres official documentation for pg_notify: > The "payload" string to be communicated along with the notification. This must be specified as a simple string literal. In the default configuration it must be shorter than 8000 bytes. (If binary data or large amounts of information need to be communicated, it's best to put it in a database table and send the key of the record.) The original triggers were invoking pg_notify with row_to_json(NEW), often causing the pg_notify calls to fail (which also caused the underlying insert/update that fired the trigger to fail too, meaning we DROPPED new or updated records) due to the JSON text being far too large. [1]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/static/sql-notify.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/static/sql-notify.html