Deleting Data From Multiple Tables

Question

Suppose,I've a table called UNIVERSITY containing universities name:

universityID    universityNAME  isACTIVE
     7            GNDU             1
     6            PU               1
     5            PTU              1
     8            LPU              1

Now these universities ID's has been(obviously) used in many tables within the database(name e.g.Education),Suppose 10 tables.

Q.Now what happen if i delete one university?

A.The universityID field in other tables becomes NULL.

But I don't want these,rather when I delete 1 university from UNIVERSITY TABLE,all its occurrences with Rows in all 10 table should get deleted.

What will be the shortest and easiest MySQL Query for this operation.

NOTE:I'm using PHP language.

Answer 1

You can do this something like that

$query = "SELECT universityID FROM UNIVERSITY WHERE universityNAME='PTU'";
$result = mysql_query($query);
$id = mysql_fetch_assoc($result);

//Create an array of tables from which you want to delete university reference
$tables = array('xyz','abc','test');

foreach($tables as $table) {
     $query = "DELETE FROM $table WHERE universityID=$id->universityID";
     mysql_query($query);
}