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2011-10-31T20:56:28.800
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Take this with a grain of salt: I'm not actually a DBA, and have never worked with SQL Server. However: You're actually up against two different rules here: <ol> <li>Referential constraints</li> <li>Business-specific (I'm assuming) 'delete-allowed' rules.</li> </ol> It sounds like when the referential constraints (in the children tables) were setup, they were created with the option <code>RESTRICT</code> or <code>NO ACTION</code>. This means that attempting to delete from the parent table will, when children rows are present, cause the failure. But the catch is that you want, on a specific table, to allow deletes, and to propogate them (option <code>CASCADE</code>). So, for only those tables where the delete should be propogated, alter the referential constraint to use <code>CASCADE</code>. Otherwise, prevent the delete with the (already present) error. As for dealing with the 'exceptions' that crop up... here are some ways to deal with them: <ol> <li>Predict them. Write your delete in such a fashion as to not delete something if the key is referenced in a set of the children tables. This is obviously not maintainable in the long term, or for a heavily-referenced table.</li> <li>Catch the exception. I doubt these can be caught 'in-script' (especially if running a single .txt-type file), so you're probably going to have to at least write a stored procedure, or run from a higher-level language. The second problem here is that you can't 'skip' the error and 'continue' the delete (that I'm aware of) - SQL is going to keep failing you every time (...on what amounts to a random row). You'd have to loop through the entire file, by line (or possibly set of lines, dynamically), to be able to ensure the record delete. For a small file (relatively), this may work.</li> <li>Write a (set) of dynamic statements that uses the information schema tables and lookups to exclude ids included in the 'non-deletable' tables. Interesting in concept, but potentially difficult/expensive.</li> </ol>
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1. POHow to attempt to delete records without terminating on error
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