How to truncate a foreign key constrained table?

user391986 picture user391986 · Mar 27, 2011 · Viewed 546.7k times · Source

Why doesn't a TRUNCATE on mygroup work? Even though I have ON DELETE CASCADE SET I get:

ERROR 1701 (42000): Cannot truncate a table referenced in a foreign key constraint (mytest.instance, CONSTRAINT instance_ibfk_1 FOREIGN KEY (GroupID) REFERENCES mytest.mygroup (ID))

drop database mytest;
create database mytest;
use mytest;

CREATE TABLE mygroup (
   ID    INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY
) ENGINE=InnoDB;

CREATE TABLE instance (
   ID           INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
   GroupID      INT NOT NULL,
   DateTime     DATETIME DEFAULT NULL,

   FOREIGN KEY  (GroupID) REFERENCES mygroup(ID) ON DELETE CASCADE,
   UNIQUE(GroupID)
) ENGINE=InnoDB;

Answer

user447951 picture user447951 · Nov 10, 2011

Yes you can:

SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS = 0;

TRUNCATE table1;
TRUNCATE table2;

SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS = 1;

With these statements, you risk letting in rows into your tables that do not adhere to the FOREIGN KEY constraints.