When creating a Foreign Key constraint on the database as shown below
ALTER TABLE BOOK ADD
(CONSTRAINT FK_BOOK_AUTHOR FOREIGN KEY (AUTHORID)
REFERENCES AUTHOR)
/
In the above example we are telling the database to check if the BOOK.AUTHORID is a valid value in the Author.AuthorID. When the Author table is being changed, the database does data verification on the BOOK table using SELECT against the BOOK table for the AUTHORID some thing like this
SELECT count(*) FROM BOOK WHERE AUTHORID = nnnn
Basically the database server is trying to check if it has children rows for the row that just changed (inserted or deleted). While doing this if there is not index on BOOK.AUTHORID, the database will have to scan the whole table which is slow. Hence when creating a Foreign Key constraint, remember to create a corresponding INDEX on the table, so that the performance does not degrade, or when observing slow performance on a database after you put in Foreign Key constraints. Make sure to look for Indexes on the columns that are constrained.