Question

This is the situation: I have two tables where the one references the other (say, table2 references table1). When creating these tables, I did set the foreign key constraint as DEFERRABLE and the ON UPDATE and ON DELETE clauses as NO ACTION (which is the default).

But still, when running the transaction below, I get the following error.

Transaction:

START TRANSACTION;
SET CONSTRAINTS ALL DEFERRED;
UPDATE table1 SET blah blah;
UPDATE table2 SET blah blah;
COMMIT;

Error:

ERROR:  update or delete on table "table1" violates foreign key constraint "table1_column_fkey" on table "table2"
DETAIL:  Key (column1)=(blahblah) is still referenced from table "table2".

And table construction:

CREATE TABLE table1(
    column1 CHAR(10),
    [...]
    PRIMARY KEY (column1)
);

CREATE TABLE table2(
    primkey CHAR(9),
    [...]
    column2 CHAR(10) NOT NULL,
    PRIMARY KEY(primkey),
    FOREIGN KEY(column2) REFERENCES table1(column1) DEFERRABLE
);

What I want to do is to defer the foreign key checking while the transaction is in progress, until it commits. I just can’t see why is this error returning and how can I make the transaction work.

Answer 1

The problem was indeed a foreign key constraint violation. I mean, the constraints were indeed deferred within the transaction, but the problem was that at the end of the transaction, after table1 and table2 were updated, the new data were violating a foreign key constraint. I was updating the primary key of a table1 row, which was still being referenced by some table2 rows. These rows I had to update them too, so that the referencing column of table2 rows matched the updated primary key of table1’s row. I changed the ‘UPDATE’ queries within the transaction and the problem got solved.

Sorry to put you into this. The solution was so simple, but that day I coudn’t see it.