Have only just had a chance to try this. There were several missing
indexes on the referencing columns including one on a table of circa
150K records. It now completes in a couple of minutes. Also it appears
to be quicker if one doesn't defer the constraints. Thanks for the
advice. Regards, Alex. Tom Lane wrote: Alexander Stanier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:I am currently trying to separate two environments contained in one database. Essentially I need to break that one database down into two with a portion of the data going to each new database. I am intending to achieve this by duplicating the database and then stripping out the data that is not required in each database. I have started by trying to delete data from a set of 28 related tables, however the performance appears to be terrible. I am deleting from a table called document which cascades down to 27 tables underneath it linked by various cascading foreign key constraints. Some of these subsidiary tables have as many as a couple of million records.Do you have indexes on the referencing columns? PG enforces an index on the referenced column, but not on the other end, and DELETE is where it will hurt if you haven't got one.regards, tom lane |