The ON UPDATE clause enables you to specify what happens to the rows in the child table when rows in the parent table are updated. You can omit the ON UPDATE clause to let MySQL to reject any updates to the rows in the child table when the rows in the parent table are updated. The ON UPDATE CASCADE action allows you to perform cross-table update, and the ON UPDATE SET NULL action resets the values in the rows in the child table to NULL values when the rows in the parent table are updated. The ON UPDATE NO ACTION or UPDATE RESTRICT actions reject any updates.