Nuno, It's the foreign keys that point to this table are the problem, not the foreign keys of the table itself. In other words, the child tables for which the table you delete from is the parent... do you have indexes on the foreign keys of the child tables which point to this table ? Those indexes will help... on the other hand, I do have here a few tables which are at the top of the FK chains, and deleting from them takes ages even if all the child tables are indexed for the foreign keys... it all depends on the size of the child tables, the number of them, if the deletion cascades or not and if yes how many rows of the child tables are deleted as well... My top table causes cascaded deletes in as much as 30 other tables, and it actually causes deletion of lots of rows in there, so I do expect it to work slow... maybe that's what you see too. Here we actually do delete first from the child tables and then delete from the parent, so the whole thing can be done in smaller transactions. Cheers, Csaba.
