Disabling constraints in 7.1.6 doesn't appear to work

I have found an interesting situation in Oracle 7.1.6.2 on HP-UX. It seems that even though you disable a foreign key constraint on a table, you are still unable to drop the parent table to which that constraint referred. You must actually DROP the foreign key constraint (not just DISABLE it) before you can DROP the parent table.

Is Oracle supposed to work this way? I would think that if the constraint is disabled, you should be able to do anything to the parent table. So even though the SQL manual says that disabling a foreign key constraint prevents Oracle from enforcing it, Oracle must still prevent you from DROPping the table as long as the constraint exists, enabled or disabled. I can kind of see how this might make sense, but at the same time, if the constraint is disabled, Oracle should ignore it. You shuold only get an error when you try to enable the constraint because the referenced table does not exist.

Has anyone else run into this issue? Is this a bug in Oracle or a subtle "feature"?

Thanks,
Brian

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Brian M. Biggs                             mailto:bbiggs_at_cincom.com
Cincom Systems, Inc.                       voice: (513) 677-7661
http://www.cincom.com/