At 03:15 AM 4/9/2002 +0530, Nataraj S Narayanan wrote:

>The Tables to delete data are Drug_Bill and Drug_Bill_Item ,where the 2nd
>table has a foriegn key of Drug_Bill by name Bill_Id.
>
>As said by Helen I gave the command 'Delete from Drug_Bill_Item where
>Bill_id in (select Bill_id from Drug_bill Where Bill_Date between
>'01-JAN-1999' and '31-DEC-1999')
>
>Unfortunately, the operation takes aeons (7 hours) to complete.

In this case, I suspect you'll have to drop the constraint to make
the delete work in finite time. The problem is not that the constraint
is being checked (why would it be?) but that the constraint causes
the creation of an index that is a disaster for deletes. Recreate
the constraint only after you have deleted the records and committed all
active transactions.

Regards,

Ann