When you create complex database structures involving many tables with foreign key constraints, views, triggers, functions, etc. you implicitly create a net of dependencies between the objects. For instance, a table with a foreign key constraint depends on the table it references.
To ensure the integrity of the entire database structure, PostgreSQL makes sure that you cannot drop objects that other objects still depend on. For example, attempting to drop the products table we considered in 5.4.5절, with the orders table depending on it, would result in an error message like this:
DROP TABLE products; ERROR: cannot drop table products because other objects depend on it DETAIL: constraint orders_product_no_fkey on table orders depends on table products HINT: Use DROP ... CASCADE to drop the dependent objects too.
The error message contains a useful hint: if you do not want to bother deleting all the dependent objects individually, you can run:
DROP TABLE products CASCADE;
and all the dependent objects will be removed, as will any objects
that depend on them, recursively. In this case, it doesn't remove
the orders table, it only removes the foreign key constraint.
It stops there because nothing depends on the foreign key constraint.
(If you want to check what DROP ... CASCADE
will do,
run DROP
without CASCADE
and read the
DETAIL
output.)
Almost all DROP
commands in PostgreSQL support
specifying CASCADE
. Of course, the nature of
the possible dependencies varies with the type of the object. You
can also write RESTRICT
instead of
CASCADE
to get the default behavior, which is to
prevent dropping objects that any other objects depend on.
According to the SQL standard, specifying either
RESTRICT
or CASCADE
is
required in a DROP
command. No database system actually
enforces that rule, but whether the default behavior
is RESTRICT
or CASCADE
varies
across systems.
If a DROP
command lists multiple
objects, CASCADE
is only required when there are
dependencies outside the specified group. For example, when saying
DROP TABLE tab1, tab2
the existence of a foreign
key referencing tab1
from tab2
would not mean
that CASCADE
is needed to succeed.
For user-defined functions, PostgreSQL tracks dependencies associated with a function's externally-visible properties, such as its argument and result types, but not dependencies that could only be known by examining the function body. As an example, consider this situation:
CREATE TYPE rainbow AS ENUM ('red', 'orange', 'yellow', 'green', 'blue', 'purple'); CREATE TABLE my_colors (color rainbow, note text); CREATE FUNCTION get_color_note (rainbow) RETURNS text AS 'SELECT note FROM my_colors WHERE color = $1' LANGUAGE SQL;
(See 37.5절 for an explanation of SQL-language
functions.) PostgreSQL will be aware that
the get_color_note
function depends on the rainbow
type: dropping the type would force dropping the function, because its
argument type would no longer be defined. But PostgreSQL
will not consider get_color_note
to depend on
the my_colors
table, and so will not drop the function if
the table is dropped. While there are disadvantages to this approach,
there are also benefits. The function is still valid in some sense if the
table is missing, though executing it would cause an error; creating a new
table of the same name would allow the function to work again.