Track · 2:53 · Liner note
Cascading Deletes
A cascading delete is a foreign-key rule that automatically removes child rows when the parent row they reference is deleted.
Delete one customer and, depending on how the schema was drawn, their orders, invoices and audit trail follow them out the door. Cascading deletes are referential integrity doing exactly what it was told, which is the unsettling part.
Play this before you run the statement, not after. Read the foreign keys, wrap it in a transaction, check the row counts, and only then decide whether the cascade is a feature or an incident report waiting for a date.