SQL Server: Drop a foreign key

Learn how to drop a foreign key in SQL Server with syntax and examples.

Description

Once a foreign key has been created, you may find that you wish to drop the foreign key from the table. You can do this with the ALTER TABLE statement in SQL Server (Transact-SQL).

Syntax

The syntax to drop a foreign key in SQL Server (Transact-SQL) is:

ALTER TABLE table_name
DROP CONSTRAINT fk_name;

Parameters or Arguments

table_name

The name of the table where the foreign key has been created.

fk_name

The name of the foreign key that you wish to remove.

Example

Let's look at an example of how to drop a foreign key in SQL Server (Transact-SQL).

For example, if you had created a foreign key as follows:

CREATE TABLE products
( product_id INT PRIMARY KEY,
  product_name VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL,
  category VARCHAR(25)
);

CREATE TABLE inventory
( inventory_id INT PRIMARY KEY,
  product_id INT NOT NULL,
  quantity INT,
  min_level INT,
  max_level INT,
  CONSTRAINT fk_inv_product_id
    FOREIGN KEY (product_id)
    REFERENCES products (product_id)
);

In this foreign key example, we've created our parent table as the products table. The products table has a primary key that consists of the product_id field.

Next, we've created a second table called inventory that will be the child table in this foreign key example. We have used the CREATE TABLE statement to create a foreign key on the inventory table called fk_inv_product_id. The foreign key establishes a relationship between the product_id column in the inventory table and the product_id column in the products table.

If we then wanted to drop the foreign key called fk_inv_product_id, we could execute the following command:

ALTER TABLE inventory
DROP CONSTRAINT fk_inv_product_id;

This foreign key example would use the ALTER TABLE statement to drop the constraint called fk_inv_product_id from the inventory table.