Question

During development of a PostgreSQL database, I made foreign keys in every table. The problem is that I forgot to select ON DELETE CASCADE option.

I need to set that options on all tables. It seems I can only drop and recreate every constraint manually.

Does anybody know any shortcuts?

Answer 1

Update the constraints directly in pg_constraint. First get the oid’s you need:

SELECT oid,* FROM pg_constraint WHERE contype = 'f';

And then update these constraints:

UPDATE pg_constraint SET confupdtype = 'c' WHERE oid = 'fk oid';

More information can be found in the manual. Please do this work within a transaction and do some tests within the transaction as well. Just to be sure.