RE: Creating a heirarchy of tables in a schema based on FK
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:39:45 -0600
Message-ID: <C970F08BBE1E164AA8063E01502A71CF01608F54_at_WIN02.hotsos.com>
It's been around since Oracle 7 when constraints were really supported in Oracle.
You could define constraints in Oracle 6, but they were not enforced. Starting in 7 they were enforced and ON DELETE CASCADE was there from the beginning.
Ric Van Dyke
Hotsos Enterprises
Hotsos Symposium
March 7 - 11, 2010
Be there.
From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Guillermo Alan Bort
Sent: Wednesday, November 18, 2009 9:16 AM
To: Igor Neyman
Cc: stbaldwin_at_multiservice.com; Steven.Rebello_at_mastek.com;
oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: Re: Creating a heirarchy of tables in a schema based on FK
It would appear I missed this for three oracle versions. It's a good thing I am not a developer then :-P
I have never used the on delete clause on a fk, not even on DBs I knew supported it. I usually prefer to manage that from the application.
Well, that was embarrassing enough for one day...
In that case, I would guess it would still require going through each table and modifying the constraint to add the ON DELETE CASCADE, which would be the same effort as writing a script to delete the tables in order :-P
Thanks for getting me out of an erred view on Oracle.
Regards.
Alan Bort
Oracle Certified Professional
On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 10:46 AM, Igor Neyman <igor.neyman_at_gmail.com> wrote:
I think ON DELETE CASCADE for FKs was supported at least since 8i.
And, at least when there is no "special" circumstances, it's better to use this feature, than creating some homegrown solution (i.e. proposed in original message - going from bottom up).
Igor N.
On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 8:03 AM, Guillermo Alan Bort <cicciuxdba_at_gmail.com> wrote:
Hierarchycal (?) models are difficult to use, specially since RDBMS allow for multiple table relations (that's what the relational is all about ;-) )
AFAIK, Oracle does not support the ON DELETE CASCADE per se, at least it doesn't in 10g (and earlier). You can emulate that using PL/SQL and/or triggers.
You can use a brute force approach, running many the delete on all the tables sorted in an arbitrary order... eventually (after four or five runs) you'll have all the tables clear. NOT the best approach, just the fastest to write :-P
Alternativeley, you can use recursion, but might not work in all relational situations.
hth
Alan Bort
Oracle Certified Professional
On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 5:12 AM, Steve Baldwin <stbaldwin_at_multiservice.com> wrote:
Could you just change the FK constraints to 'ON DELETE CASCADE' then just delete from the top level table(s)? This is by far the least amount of work.
Alternatively, you could write a recursive function that fetches from user_constraints and user_cons_columns and uses either dbms_sql or execute immediate (depending on your Oracle version) to execute the delete statement.
Hope this helps.
On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 6:30 PM, Steven Rebello
<Steven.Rebello_at_mastek.com> wrote:
> Hi List members
>
> Would like your help/inputs in a problem I am facing here.
>
> I want to clear out records from a huge bunch of selected tables
(1000+) which have interdependencies established using FK constraints.
Of course, just creating a "delete * from table" doesn't work because of
the FK constraints.
>
> What I want to do is to identify the "child" tables which can be
deleted first and then create the hierarchy of tables so that the parent
tables can then be cleared out, and so on.
>
> Can anyone point me to any reference or script which can generate this
hierarchy based on the foreign key constraints? Based on that I can then
make the delete script pretty quickly.
>
> I thought of disabling the constraints and re-enabling them after the
"delete * from table" script, but would like to try the cleaner approach
of starting from the bottom of the dependency tree for these tables.
>
> Thanks
> Steven Rebello
> MASTEK LTD.
> Mastek is in NASSCOM's 'India Top 20' Software Service Exporters List.
> In the US, we're called MAJESCOMASTEK
>
>
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