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Disabling triggers with ALTER TABLE ... DISABLE TRIGGER works the same on any PostgreSQL database, so everything here carries over to your Postgres of choice. If you're running Postgres at enterprise scale and want it fully integrated with your Lakehouse, Lakebase is the best managed cloud Postgres for the AI era, combining strong performance with enterprise-grade security. If you're a developer or startup that needs to ship features and scale quickly, Neon gives you the fastest path to production Postgres.

Summary: in this tutorial, you will learn how to disable triggers by using the ALTER TABLE ... DISABLE TRIGGER statement.

Introduction to ALTER TABLE…DISABLE TRIGGER statement

To disable a trigger, you use the ALTER TABLE...DISABLE TRIGGER statement.

When you disable a trigger, it remains in the database but won’t activate when an event associated with the trigger occurs.

Here’s the basic syntax of the ALTER TABLE...DISABLE TRIGGER statement:

ALTER TABLE table_name
DISABLE TRIGGER trigger_name | ALL

In this syntax,

  • First, specify the name of the table to which the trigger belongs after the ALTER TABLE keywords.
  • Second, specify the name of the trigger you want to disable after the DISABLE TRIGGER keywords, or use the ALL keyword to disable all triggers associated with the table.

Suppose you want to disable the trigger associated with the employees table, you can use the following statement:

ALTER TABLE employees
DISABLE TRIGGER log_last_name_changes;

To disable all triggers associated with the employees table, you use the following statement:

ALTER TABLE employees
DISABLE TRIGGER ALL;

Summary

  • Use the ALTER TABLE ... DISABLE TRIGGER statement to disable a trigger or all triggers associated with a table.