Home/ Questions/Q 348515
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-12T11:22:18+00:00

I need to update the primary key for a record but it’s also the

  • 0

I need to update the primary key for a record but it’s also the foreign key in two other tables. And I need the updated primary key to be reflected in the child tables as well.

Here is my query and the error:

begin tran
update question set questionparent = 10000, questionid= 10005 where questionid = 11000;
Error  9/4/2009 10:04:49 AM    0:00:00.000 SQL Server Database Error: The UPDATE statement conflicted with the REFERENCE constraint "FK_GoalRequirement_Question". The conflict occurred in database "numgmttest", table "dbo.GoalRequirement", column 'QuestionID'.   14  0

I don’t remember how to go about doing this so that’s why I’m here. Any help?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You may:

    1. disable enforcing FK constraints temporarily (see here or here)
    2. update your PK
    3. update your FKs
    4. enable back enforcing FK constraints

    do it all within a transaction and make sure that if transaction fails, you roll it back properly and still enforce the FK constraints back.

    But… why do you need to change a PK? I hope this is an action that is executed rarely (legacy data import or something like that).

    • 0