Mysql – Will a row update check all child tables which have foreign key relationships in InnoDB

Foreign key relationships are to enforce data integrity, not for query performance, that is what indexes are for. Also note that InnoDB creates an index on each column with a foreign key relationship.

However I would recommend having the foreign key relationships to ensure that the data is always valid, especially when updating and deleting, which may become significant when you have to start archiving data.

On the face of it, that does seem impossible.

The thing is, your error suggests it's not that you're trying to delete at all.

The message you're getting suggests you're trying to insert or update a row in the child table, not delete a row from the parent table. If the foreign key you posted was causing the problem relative to a delete, you should see this message, instead:

Cannot delete or update a parent row: a foreign key constraint fails (`test`.`bar`, CONSTRAINT `bar_ibfk_1` FOREIGN KEY (`foo_id`) REFERENCES `foo` (`id`))

It's also possible you have some BEFORE DELETE trigger magic on survey_main that's doing something unexpected.

Right after this error occurs, try this:

SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS;

The LATEST FOREIGN KEY ERROR section should give you something more to go on. Failing that, you could enable the general log, which will show queries executed by triggers and other stored programs, as well as the queries you're directly executing, to shed light on what might be going on behind the scenes.

Update (#1) Things are definitely not as they seem and the full table definitions are going to be pretty critical, here.

Also, the version of MySQL you're using may also be relevant, so please mention it.

With nothing more to go on at the moment, I'm speculating that you have invalid data in the survey_id column of the survey_answers table. To test that theory:

SELECT *
  FROM survey_answers sa
  LEFT JOIN survey_main sm ON sm.id = sa.survey_id
 WHERE sm.id IS NULL;

If I understand your schema correctly, then this query will return zero rows if I am wrong. :) If you get rows returned, then those rows have survey_answers records that contain an survey_id value that doesn't exist in the id column of survey_main.