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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-15T11:32:46+00:00

I have a table with 3 columns: ID, PARENT_ID, NAME PARENT_ID has a foreign

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I have a table with 3 columns:

ID, PARENT_ID, NAME

PARENT_ID has a foreign key relationship with ID in the same table. This table is modeling a hierarchy.

Sometimes the ID of a record will change. I want to be able to update a record’s ID, then update the dependent records’ PARENT_ID to point to the new ID.

The problem is, when I attempt to update the ID of a record it breaks the integrity and fails immediately.

I realize I could insert a new record with the new ID, then update the children, then delete the old record, but we have a lot of triggers in place that would get screwed up if I did that.

Is there any way to temporarily update the parent with the promise of updating the children (obviously it would fail on commit) without disabling the foreign key briefly?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    What you want is a ‘deferred constraint‘.

    You can pick between the two types of deferrable constraints, ‘INITIALLY IMMEDIATE’ and ‘INITIALLY DEFERRED’ to drive default behavior – whether the database should default to check the constraint after every statement, or if it should default to only checking constraints at the end of the transaction.

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