I found an example of someone using pg_listen, the postgres Pub/Sub extension in Clojure but it felt very java-y? ;; https://gist.githubusercontent.com/mikeball/ba04dd5479f51c00205f/raw/583f292cc2ba2528ffa0629d92de0fbe597d7cb7/core.clj I did my best to make it look more how I (as a beginner) would expect it to. ;; http://ix.io/2C8g Unfortunately the way I made it, returns a PGPreparedStatement instead of a PGSimpleStatement.

;; how to go from this
(doto (.createStatement connection)
      (.execute "LISTEN messages;")
      (.close))

;; to something using clojure's JDBC (?) 
(jdbc/prepare-statement 
  (jdbc/get-connection pg-db) 
  "LISTEN messages;")

(Caveat: I'm no PostgreSQL user) According to that gist, you need to keep a connection open all the time you're listening and you need to add a notification listener to the connection -- and that's the same connection you should use for the create statement.

So, first off you'll need to have something like (def conn (doto (jdbc/get-connection pg-db) (.addNotificationListener your-listener)))

And clojure.java.jdbc doesn't offer a way to create a plain statement, as far as I recall (`next.jdbc` does support that), so you really need to use the Java interop in that gist.

The gist is idiomatic @mksybr -- Clojure is a hosted language so using interop is expected when dealing with certain java objects (like this example).

It would be easier to use next.jdbc here if you insist on trying to wrap the Java interop.

(with-open [stmt (next.jdbc.prepare/statement conn)]
  (execute! stmt ["LISTEN messages"]))

(that automatically closes the statement after use)