PSQL: Sleeping

Generally you want your SQL statements to run against your database as quickly as possible. For those times when you are doing some sort of debugging or just want your queries to look very computationally expensive, PostgreSQL offers the pg_sleep function.

To sleep for 5 seconds, try the following:

> select now(); select pg_sleep(5); select now();
              now
-------------------------------
 2016-01-08 16:30:21.251081-06
(1 row)

Time: 0.274 ms
 pg_sleep
----------

(1 row)

Time: 5001.459 ms
              now
-------------------------------
 2016-01-08 16:30:26.252953-06
(1 row)

Time: 0.260 ms

As you’ll notice, the pg_sleep statement took about 5 seconds.

Via jbranchaud/til.