@lectroid10-sqlservercentral

I certainly agree that cascading constraints can be dangerous, and I agree that this is an enabler rather than a constraint so it doesn't really do 'what it says on the tin'. I've never used cascading deletes- they strike me with terror. Certainly, the working of every cascaded update should be checked in detail before you use them in a production system. (see, for example, Paul White's brilliant answer here Performance tuning a cascading delete with many foreign keys ) However, what I like about the technique is that the data tends to be more 'visible' and so it is easier to trawl for errors. Also, one can create a well-normalized database without looking over your shoulder the whole time and worrying about performance issues.