Howard J. Rogers wrote:

> Er, hold your horses!
>
> Oracle *never* drops child tables. It never even drops child *rows*. All
> the 'cascade constraints' keywords do is to get rid of the *constraint*.
> Child rows and tables are left 100% inviolate and unaffected by the use of
> those keywords...
>

Quite right .... with due apologies for some rather &^@#%&(% wording, I
submit the following proof to support Howard's assertion:


SQL*Plus: Release 9.2.0.1.0 - Production on Tue Sep 25 21:13:59 2001

Copyright (c) 1982, 2002, Oracle Corporation. All rights reserved.


Connected to:
Oracle9i Enterprise Edition Release 9.2.0.1.0 - Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP and Oracle Data Mining options
JServer Release 9.2.0.1.0 - Production

SQL> create table p ( c varchar(2), constraint P_PK PRIMARY KEY (c));

Table created.

SQL> create table c ( c varchar(2), constraint c_fk foreign key (c)
references p(c));

Table created.

SQL> insert into p values ('A');

1 row created.

SQL> insert into c values ('A');

1 row created.

SQL> drop table p;
drop table p
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-02449: unique/primary keys in table referenced by foreign keys


SQL> drop table p cascade constraints;

Table dropped.

SQL> desc c
Name Null? Type
----------------------------------------- --------
----------------------------
C VARCHAR2(2)

SQL>