I wrote a trigger function with the intent of preventing the deletion of a parent record when a referencing record would not allow it. However, the result is that the referencing record stays, but the referenced one is gone, so that my foreign key constraint is not respected. The behaviour can be replicated with the following: create table parent(id serial primary key); create table dependent (id integer primary key references parent on delete cascade); create or replace function check_delete() returns trigger as $$ BEGIN if TG_OP = 'DELETE' then raise notice 'preventing delete'; return null; else return OLD; end if; END; $$ language 'plpgsql'; CREATE TRIGGER trig_check_delete BEFORE DELETE ON dependent FOR EACH ROW EXECUTE PROCEDURE check_delete(); insert into parent values(1); insert into dependent values(1); delete from parent; The record in the dependent table is left behind, while the referenced parent is gone. Is this a bug? I'm using PostgreSQL version 8.0.4 on Linux. Luca