Package pq is a Go PostgreSQL driver for database/sql. Most clients will use the database/sql package instead of using this package directly. For example: You can also connect with an URL: See NewConfig. database/sql does not dictate any specific format for parameter placeholders, and pq uses the PostgreSQL-native ordinal markers ($1, $2, etc.). The same placeholder can be used more than once: pq does not support sql.Result.LastInsertId. Use the RETURNING clause with a Query or QueryRow call instead to return the identifier: Parameters pass through driver.DefaultParameterConverter before they are handled by this package. When the binary_parameters connection option is enabled, []byte values are sent directly to the backend as data in binary format. This package returns the following types for values from the PostgreSQL backend: All other types are returned directly from the backend as []byte values in text format. pq may return errors of type *pq.Error which contain error details: You can perform bulk imports by preparing a statement returned by CopyIn (or CopyInSchema) in an explicit transaction (sql.Tx). The returned statement handle can then be repeatedly "executed" to copy data into the target table. After all data has been processed you should call Exec() once with no arguments to flush all buffered data. Any call to Exec() might return an error which should be handled appropriately, but because of the internal buffering an error returned by Exec() might not be related to the data passed in the call that failed. CopyIn uses COPY FROM internally. It is not possible to COPY outside of an explicit transaction in pq. PostgreSQL supports a simple publish/subscribe model using PostgreSQL's NOTIFY mechanism. To start listening for notifications, you first have to open a new connection to the database by calling NewListener. This connection can not be used for anything other than LISTEN / NOTIFY. Calling Listen will open a "notification channel"; once a notification channel is open, a notification generated on that channel will effect a send on the Listener.Notify channel. A notification channel will remain open until Unlisten is called, though connection loss might result in some notifications being lost. To solve this problem, Listener sends a nil pointer over the Notify channel any time the connection is re-established following a connection loss. The application can get information about the state of the underlying connection by setting an event callback in the call to NewListener. A single Listener can safely be used from concurrent goroutines, which means that there is often no need to create more than one Listener in your application. However, a Listener is always connected to a single database, so you will need to create a new Listener instance for every database you want to receive notifications in. The channel name in both Listen and Unlisten is case sensitive, and can contain any characters legal in an identifier. Note that the channel name will be truncated to 63 bytes by the PostgreSQL server. You can find a complete, working example of Listener usage at cmd/pqlisten. If you need support for Kerberos authentication, add the following to your main package: This package is in a separate module so that users who don't need Kerberos don't have to add unnecessary dependencies.