Most of the time I have seen database foreign key constraints on tables without indexes on those columns. Lets say the application is trying to delete a row from the CUSTOMER table
DELETE FROM CUSTOMER WHERE CUSTOMERID = 1000;
When the database goes about deleting the customerId of 1000, if there are foreign key constraints defined on customerId, then the database is going to try to find if the customerId of 1000 is used in any of those tables. Lets say ORDER table has the customerId column, the database is going to issue