5.14. Dependency Tracking
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, Postgres Pro makes sure that you cannot drop objects that other objects still depend on. For example, attempting to drop the products table we considered in Section 5.4.5, 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 Postgres Pro 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.
Note
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 a user-defined function or procedure whose body is defined as a string literal, Postgres Pro tracks dependencies associated with the 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 Section 36.5 for an explanation of SQL-language functions.) Postgres Pro 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 Postgres Pro 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.
On the other hand, for a SQL-language function or procedure whose body is written in SQL-standard style, the body is parsed at function definition time and all dependencies recognized by the parser are stored. Thus, if we write the function above as
CREATE FUNCTION get_color_note (rainbow) RETURNS text BEGIN ATOMIC SELECT note FROM my_colors WHERE color = $1; END;
then the function's dependency on the my_colors
table will be known and enforced by DROP
.