Delete a user from a table whose name is a foreign key in other tables

Question

Dear All;
I am trying to figure out an easy way to do this. I just recently took someone application who utilized 500 tables. I am trying to delete a user from a table called member_table. However, I am having problems doing so because the user name is a foreign key in other tables which has a relationship with this member_table. I really can't naviagte through all 500 different tables and start deleting the user from each table . hence, I would like to figure out a way to delete the user from the member_table without getting the error message
ORA - 02292 "Integrity Constraint (....) violated child record found

Answer 1

Unless you want to find and re-create all of the FK's that point to that field so you can make them ON DELETE CASCADE (note it is the FK not the PK that has that attribute), you will need to either delete that member id from each of the child tables individually or update each one individually to either null or some valid value in member_table before you can delete the id from member_table.
You can find all of the tables, and the corresponding column_name that have an FK relationship to memeber_table with the following:
SELECT c.table_name, col.column_name
FROM user_constraints c, user_cons_columns col
WHERE c.constraint_name = col.constraint_name and
      c.r_constraint_name = (SELECT constraint_name
                             FROM user_constraints
                             WHERE table_name = 'MEMBER_TABLE' and
                                   constraint_type = 'P') and
     c.constraint_type = 'R';If there are a lot of these, you could use something similar to generate the set of delete/update statements that would be needed.
John