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Performance Impact of Foreign Keys with Non-Default ON UPDATE or ON DELETE

Hugo Kornelis continues a dive into foreign keys:

Welcome to part fifteen of the plansplaining series. In the three previous parts I looked at the operators and properties in an execution plan that check a modification doesn’t violate foreign key constraints. That part is done. But I’m not done with foreign keys yet.

We normally expect foreign keys to throw an error on violations. But that’s actually only the default option: they can also be set to be self-correcting. This is done using the ON UPDATE and ON DELETE clauses, which provide the user with several choices on how to handle child data that would become orphaned, and hence violate the constraint, as a result of a change in the parent table.

Read on to see how these operate in SQL Server.