Christopher Murtagh <christopher.murtagh@mcgill.ca> writes:
> I would like to write a trigger or function that spawns a forked
> process so that the transaction is considered 'complete' to the client,
> but continues to perform more work.
It's not very clear what you are hoping to have the forked process do,
but if it's supposed to be another backend, forget it --- won't work.
See this thread:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-sql/2005-04/msg00329.php
regards, tom lane