Question

This seems so simple, but I haven’t been able to find an answer to this question.

What do I want? A master table with rows that delete themselves whenever they are not referenced (via foreign keys) anymore. The solution may or may not be specific to PostgreSql.

How? One of my approaches to solving this problem (actually, the only approach so far) involves the following: For every table that references this master table, on UPDATE or DELETE of a row, to check for the referenced row in master, how many other other rows still refer to the referenced row. If it drops down to zero, then I delete that row in master as well.

(If you have a better idea, I’d like to know!)

In detail:
I have one master table referenced by many others

CREATE TABLE master (
  id serial primary key,
  name text unique not null
);

All the other tables have the same format generally:

CREATE TABLE other (
  ...
  master_id integer references master (id)
  ...
);

If one of these are not NULL, they refer to a row in master. If I go to this and try to delete it, I will get an error message, because it is already referred to:

ERROR:  update or delete on table "master" violates foreign key constraint "other_master_id_fkey" on table "other"
DETAIL:  Key (id)=(1) is still referenced from table "other".
Time: 42.972 ms

Note that it doesn’t take too long to figure this out even if I have many tables referencing master. How do I find this information out without having to raise an error?

Answer 1

You can do one of the following:

1) Add reference_count field to master table. Using triggers on detail tables increase the reference count whenever a row with this master_id is added. Decrease the count, when row gets deleted. When reference_count reaches 0 – delete the record.

2) Use pg_constraint table (details here) to get the list of referencing tables and create a dynamic SQL query.

3) Create triggers on every detail table, that deletes master_id in main table. Silence error messages with BEGIN ... EXCEPTION ... END.