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I have a postgres table with some triggers that fire if records are udpated or deleted. They basically archive the records so they are not trully deleted - they just change certain attributes so the records are not displayed in corresponding views.

Sometimes I want to manually delete a record for good, but I can't do it because the trigger fires and does it's thing if I execute DELETE query.

Example: DELETE FROM records WHERE operator = 20

Is there a way to run DELETE query and bypass a trigger that fires on DELETE?

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With a setup like this, I think the typical approach is to avoid granting any direct privileges on the underlying table, and put your INSERT / UPDATE / DELETE triggers on the view (allowing the table owner to change it as needed).

If you are the table owner, you can use ALTER TABLE to temporarily DISABLE and re-ENABLE the trigger. As long as you do all of this within a transaction, you'll be safe against concurrent DELETEs, though they'll block until your transaction commits.

If you have superuser privileges, you can also prevent triggers from firing by setting session_replication_role to replica, provided that the trigger in question hasn't been configured to fire on replicated databases.

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I think the disable/enable trigger way is what you want. Maybe you can use the logical decoding feature in newer PostgreSQL versions to write an audit log (into a separate table) - without firing costly triggers all the time. This way you can delete records from the audit table without hassle.

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