The ability to temporarily enable or disable a trigger is provided by ALTER TABLE, not by
ALTER
TRIGGER
, because
ALTER TRIGGER
has no convenient way to express the option of enabling or
disabling all of a table’s triggers at once.
ALTER TABLE
DISABLE TRIGGER [trigger_name| ALL | USER ]
ENABLE TRIGGER [trigger_name| ALL | USER ]
ENABLE REPLICA TRIGGERtrigger_name
ENABLE ALWAYS TRIGGERtrigger_name
DISABLE
/
ENABLE [ REPLICA | ALWAYS ] TRIGGER
These forms configure the firing of trigger(s) belonging to the table. A disabled trigger is still
known to the system, but is not executed when its triggering event occurs. For a deferred trigger,
the enable status is checked when the event occurs, not when the trigger function is actually
executed. One can disable or enable a single trigger specified by name, or all triggers on the
table, or only user triggers (this option excludes internally generated constraint triggers such as
those that are used to implement foreign key constraints or deferrable uniqueness and exclusion
constraints). Disabling or enabling internally generated constraint triggers requires superuser
privileges; it should be done with caution since of course the integrity of the constraint cannot
be guaranteed if the triggers are not executed. The trigger firing mechanism is also affected by
the configuration variable session_replication_role. Simply enabled triggers will fire when the
replication role is “origin” (the default) or “local”. Triggers configured as
ENABLE REPLICA

will only fire if the session is in “replica” mode, and triggers configured as
ENABLE ALWAYS
will fire regardless of the current replication mode.
This command acquires a
SHARE ROW EXCLUSIVE
lock

trigger_name
Name of a single trigger to disable or enable.
ALL
Disable or enable all triggers belonging to the table. (This requires superuser privilege if any of
the triggers are internally generated constraint triggers such as those that are used to implement
foreign key constraints or deferrable uniqueness and exclusion constraints.)
USER
Disable or enable all triggers belonging to the table except for internally generated constraint
triggers such as those that are used to implement foreign key constraints or deferrable uniqueness
and exclusion constraints