SQL ON DELETE CASCADE, Which Way Does the Deletion Occur?

Question

If I have two relations in a database, like this:

CREATE TABLE Courses (
  CourseID int NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
  Course VARCHAR(63) NOT NULL UNIQUE,
  Code CHAR(4) NOT NULL UNIQUE
);

CREATE TABLE BookCourses (
  EntryID int NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
  BookID int NOT NULL,
  Course CHAR(4) NOT NULL,
  CourseNum CHAR(3) NOT NULL,
  CourseSec CHAR(1) NOT NULL
);

and I establish a foreign key relationship between the two, like this:

ALTER TABLE BookCourses
ADD FOREIGN KEY (Course)
REFERENCES Courses(Code)
ON DELETE CASCADE;

Then you can see that the Course attribute in the BookCourses relation references the Code attribute in the Courses relation.

My question is when a deletion occurs in either of the two relations, which way does the deletion cascade? If I delete a tuple in the Courses relation, will it delete all referencing tuples in the BookCourses relation, or is it the other way around?

Answer 1

Cascade will work when you delete something on table Courses. Any record on table BookCourses that has reference to table Courses will be deleted automatically.

But when you try to delete on table BookCourses only the table itself is affected and not on the Courses

follow-up question: why do you have CourseID on table Category?

Maybe you should restructure your schema into this,

CREATE TABLE Categories 
(
  Code CHAR(4) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
  CategoryName VARCHAR(63) NOT NULL UNIQUE
);

CREATE TABLE Courses 
(
  CourseID INT NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
  BookID INT NOT NULL,
  CatCode CHAR(4) NOT NULL,
  CourseNum CHAR(3) NOT NULL,
  CourseSec CHAR(1) NOT NULL,
);

ALTER TABLE Courses
ADD FOREIGN KEY (CatCode)
REFERENCES Categories(Code)
ON DELETE CASCADE;