SQLAlchemy: cascade delete

The problem is that sqlalchemy considers Child as the parent, because that is where you defined your relationship (it doesn't care that you called it "Child" of course).

If you define the relationship on the Parent class instead, it will work:

children = relationship("Child", cascade="all,delete", backref="parent")

(note "Child" as a string: this is allowed when using the declarative style, so that you are able to refer to a class that is not yet defined)

You might want to add delete-orphan as well (delete causes children to be deleted when the parent gets deleted, delete-orphan also deletes any children that were "removed" from the parent, even if the parent is not deleted)

EDIT: just found out: if you really want to define the relationship on the Child class, you can do so, but you will have to define the cascade on the backref (by creating the backref explicitly), like this:

parent = relationship(Parent, backref=backref("children", cascade="all,delete"))

(implying from sqlalchemy.orm import backref)

@Steven's asnwer is good when you are deleting through session.delete() which never happens in my case. I noticed that most of the time I delete through session.query().filter().delete() (which doesn't put elements in the memory and deletes directly from db).Using this method sqlalchemy's cascade='all, delete' doesn't work. There is a solution though: ON DELETE CASCADE through db (note: not all databases support it).

class Child(Base):    __tablename__ = "children"    id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)    parent_id = Column(Integer, ForeignKey("parents.id", ondelete='CASCADE'))class Parent(Base):    __tablename__ = "parents"    id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)    child = relationship(Child, backref="parent", passive_deletes=True)

Pretty old post, but I just spent an hour or two on this, so I wanted to share my finding, especially since some of the other comments listed aren't quite right.

TL;DR

Give the child table a foreign or modify the existing one, adding ondelete='CASCADE':

parent_id = db.Column(db.Integer, db.ForeignKey('parent.id', ondelete='CASCADE'))

And one of the following relationships:

a) This on the parent table:

children = db.relationship('Child', backref='parent', passive_deletes=True)

b) Or this on the child table:

parent = db.relationship('Parent', backref=backref('children', passive_deletes=True))

Details

First off, despite what the accepted answer says, the parent/child relationship is not established by using relationship, it's established by using ForeignKey. You can put the relationship on either the parent or child tables and it will work fine. Although, apparently on the child tables, you have to use the backref function in addition to the keyword argument.

Option 1 (preferred)

Second, SqlAlchemy supports two different kinds of cascading. The first, and the one I recommend, is built into your database and usually takes the form of a constraint on the foreign key declaration. In PostgreSQL it looks like this:

CONSTRAINT child_parent_id_fkey FOREIGN KEY (parent_id)REFERENCES parent_table(id) MATCH SIMPLEON DELETE CASCADE

This means that when you delete a record from parent_table, then all the corresponding rows in child_table will be deleted for you by the database. It's fast and reliable and probably your best bet. You set this up in SqlAlchemy through ForeignKey like this (part of the child table definition):

parent_id = db.Column(db.Integer, db.ForeignKey('parent.id', ondelete='CASCADE'))parent = db.relationship('Parent', backref=backref('children', passive_deletes=True))

The ondelete='CASCADE' is the part that creates the ON DELETE CASCADE on the table.

Gotcha!

There's an important caveat here. Notice how I have a relationship specified with passive_deletes=True? If you don't have that, the entire thing will not work. This is because by default when you delete a parent record SqlAlchemy does something really weird. It sets the foreign keys of all child rows to NULL. So if you delete a row from parent_table where id = 5, then it will basically execute

UPDATE child_table SET parent_id = NULL WHERE parent_id = 5

Why you would want this I have no idea. I'd be surprised if many database engines even allowed you to set a valid foreign key to NULL, creating an orphan. Seems like a bad idea, but maybe there's a use case. Anyway, if you let SqlAlchemy do this, you will prevent the database from being able to clean up the children using the ON DELETE CASCADE that you set up. This is because it relies on those foreign keys to know which child rows to delete. Once SqlAlchemy has set them all to NULL, the database can't delete them. Setting the passive_deletes=True prevents SqlAlchemy from NULLing out the foreign keys.

You can read more about passive deletes in the SqlAlchemy docs.

Option 2

The other way you can do it is to let SqlAlchemy do it for you. This is set up using the cascade argument of the relationship. If you have the relationship defined on the parent table, it looks like this:

children = relationship('Child', cascade='all,delete', backref='parent')

If the relationship is on the child, you do it like this:

parent = relationship('Parent', backref=backref('children', cascade='all,delete'))

Again, this is the child so you have to call a method called backref and putting the cascade data in there.

With this in place, when you delete a parent row, SqlAlchemy will actually run delete statements for you to clean up the child rows. This will likely not be as efficient as letting this database handle if for you so I don't recommend it.

Here are the SqlAlchemy docs on the cascading features it supports.