L' Eomot Inversé (3/21/2013)
I guess if you are in a situation where you can't use foreign keys, which is what you appear to be saying, the question of using cascade doesn't arise at all - even I, an ardent supporter of cascade, wouldn't dream of suggesting you use cascade in that case; unlike many, I refuse to belive in or advocate impossible things (not even before breakfast).
I seem to recalll that very old versions of SQL Server (I believe prior to 6.0 or so) did not support foreign keys. If you wanted a foreign key relationship, you built a trigger to enforce it. And since you wrote the trigger code yourself, you had the choice on what to do on violations - rollback and error ("NO ACTION"), or attempt to fix ("SET NULL" / "SET DEFAULT" / "CASCADE").
If Marlon is in a similar situation, then:
1) I don't envy her. At all.
2) I see no problem in using triggers to enforce the business need to cascade on deletion from a specific table.