How can I temporarily disable a foreign key constraint in MySQL?
Try DISABLE KEYS or
SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0;Make sure to
SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=1;after.
To turn off foreign key constraint globally, do the following:
SET GLOBAL FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0;and remember to set it back when you are done
SET GLOBAL FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=1;WARNING: You should only do this when you are doing single user mode maintenance. As it might resulted in data inconsistency. For example, it will be very helpful when you are uploading large amount of data using a mysqldump output.
I normally only disable foreign key constraints when I want to truncate a table, and since I keep coming back to this answer this is for future me:
SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0;TRUNCATE TABLE table;SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=1;