PG_SLEEP

Pause the current session for a given number of seconds.

Category: miscReturns: VOIDDialect: PostgreSql

Syntax

PG_SLEEP(seconds)

Description

## Overview Pauses the current session for the specified number of seconds. Use this function for testing, reproducing race conditions, or pacing a script during development. It has no meaningful use in production analytics queries. ## Behavior - Accepts fractional seconds for sub-second precision. - Returns void (no meaningful value). - Deterministic with respect to the input duration but blocks the session for that duration. - Has a side effect: the session is occupied for the requested time. ## Compatibility - PG-compat alias for `pg_sleep` function.

Parameters

Name	Type	Description
`seconds`		Specifies the delay in seconds. Fractional values (for example, 0.5 for 500 milliseconds) are supported. Must be non-negative.

Examples

-- Sleep for one second
SELECT PG_SLEEP(1);

-- Sleep for half a second
SELECT PG_SLEEP(0.5);

-- Use during test scenarios to simulate latency
SELECT 'step 1' AS status;
SELECT PG_SLEEP(2);
SELECT 'step 2' AS status;

Pitfalls

PG_SLEEP holds a session slot for the entire duration. Running it in a production workload can starve other queries of connections.
Negative durations raise an error. If the argument is computed at runtime, clamp to zero before calling.
The actual sleep may be slightly longer than requested due to OS scheduling. Do not use PG_SLEEP to implement precise timing; use it only for coarse delays.
PG_SLEEP is blocking at the session level but is not a transaction-safe barrier. Operations on other sessions continue normally.