Test referential integrity on delete
Hard120 pts~45 min
- Referential integrity
- ON DELETE behaviour
Practice app · Acme Commerce DB
A real SQL database (SQLite engine) seeded with an e-commerce and HR dataset, with schema browser and query runner.
Your starter code already declares TEST_URL — never hardcode a host.
Objective
Verify a department with employees cannot be deleted, an empty department can, and no employee is left pointing at a missing department.
Your task
- 1Try DELETE FROM departments WHERE name = 'QA'; employees reference it, so it must fail.
- 2Delete the empty 'Support' department; it must succeed.
- 3Verify: SELECT COUNT(*) AS orphaned_employees FROM employees e LEFT JOIN departments d ON d.id = e.department_id WHERE e.department_id IS NOT NULL AND d.id IS NULL.
Acceptance criteria
- Deleting QA fails with FOREIGN KEY constraint failed
- Only Support was removed from departments
- The last result set shows 0 orphaned employees
Constraints
- Every run starts from a freshly seeded database, so your script must include its own setup statements.
- A failing statement is recorded and the script keeps running, so you can trigger an error and verify afterwards.
- Only the last result set of your script is compared, so finish with the verification query.
SQL (SQLite engine) · Database Testing · Constraints & keys