Is there a way to test whether DELETE will fail due to constraints?

Question

I'd like to be able to predict whether a DELETE will run into a constraint violation, without actually performing the delete.

What are my options for doing this? Is there a simple way to do a "dry run" of a DELETE?

Answer 1

If your goal is to process all deletes only if they all succeed, why not just use TRY/CATCH:

BEGIN TRANSACTION;
BEGIN TRY
  DELETE #1;
  DELETE #2;
  DELETE #3;
  COMMIT TRANSACTION;
END TRY
BEGIN CATCH
  ROLLBACK TRANSACTION;
END CATCH

If the goal is to allow all successful deletes to succeed even if one or more will fail, then you can use individual TRY/CATCH, e.g.

BEGIN TRY
  DELETE #1;
END TRY
BEGIN CATCH
  PRINT 1;
END CATCH

BEGIN TRY
  DELETE #2;
END TRY
BEGIN CATCH
  PRINT 1;
END CATCH

Answer 2

One option is to begin a transaction, run your delete, and then always rollback:

begin tran

delete Table1 where col1 = 1

-- Test whether it is there
select * from Table1 where col1 = 1

rollback tran

-- Confirm that it is still there
select * from Table1 where col1 = 1

Answer 3

I would like to improve the solution provided by Aaron Bertrand with some code, in case you want to try to add any element of a table, managing the exceptions to ignore fails or also stop the process afters errors.

This one will select the records from the table and then tries to delete them without exceptions:

DECLARE @MaxErrors INT
SET @MaxErrors = 5;    // Setting 0 will stop process after the first error!

SELECT
    [Id]
    , ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY Id ASC) AS [Index]
INTO #DeletingItems
FROM myTable

DECLARE @Current INT, @Max INT, @Id INT, @TotErrors INT
SELECT
    @Current = 1
    , @TotErrors = 0
    , @Max = MAX([Index])
FROM #DeletingTable

WHILE @Current <= @Max
BEGIN
    SELECT
        @Id = [Id]
    FROM #DeletingItems
    WHERE
        [Index] = @Index;

    BEGIN TRANSACTION;    
    BEGIN TRY    
        DELETE FROM myTable WHERE [Id] = @Id;

        COMMIT TRANSACTION;    
    END TRY    
    BEGIN CATCH    
        ROLLBACK TRANSACTION;

        SET @TotErrors = @TotErrors + 1;

        IF @TotErrors > @MaxErrors
            BREAK;
    END CATCH

    SET @Current = @Current + 1;
END