Re: Cascading Deletes

Goran Sliskovic wrote in message <9634sg$e8bh$1_at_as121.tel.hr>... <snip>
>... Though I think that sometimes it is very usefull, and it should be
>decided depending on individual case, rather than as a general rule. Don't
>think there is a general answer like yes or no to your question.
<snip>

You have found the meat of the question, where do you draw the line between yes it's ok and no it's not? Granted, some situations make it mighty tempting to use them. However, customers almost always change their minds, even on rules that are "set in stone". This could easily make a cascading delete invalid, which means a change in the datamodel; and we all know that sometimes even a simple change to the datamodel can have a far reaching impact on any number of applications.

Again, I will counter with this: How hard is it to write an extra DELETE statement or two. From what I have found, most of these "qualified" situations are header/detail where all anyone is trying to get out of is writing the following:

DELETE from tblDetail where parentID = x;

Why people would prefer to risk inadvertant data loss in order to keep from having to write the above line of code is beyond me.

I thank you for the response. This is exactly what prompted the discussion at my office.

TNT Received on Sun Feb 11 2001 - 22:15:04 CET