Question

If I have a Parent and Child table in MySQL related by a foreign key, is it possible using a SQL statement to move certain rows from Parent and the related rows from Child into archive tables (e.g. Parent_Archive and Child_Archive) in an atomic manner?

Answer 1

Use transactions – their whole purpose is to make the series of SQL statements atomic.

For example (NOT very optimized – can be improved with temp table):

START TRANSACTION;

INSERT Child_Archive 
SELECT DISTINCT 
Child.* FROM Child, Parent
WHERE Child.FK = Parent.PK
  AND Parent.something=11; 

DELETE Child WHERE FK IN (
    SELECT DISTINCT PK FROM Parent WHERE Parent.something=11); 

INSERT Parent_Archive
SELECT DISTINCT * FROM Parent WHERE Parent.something=11;

DELETE Parent WHERE Parent.something=11;

COMMIT;