Kenneth Fisher takes us through a case of deleting rows:
Deleting rows from a table is a pretty simple task right? Not always. Foreign keys, while providing a ton of benefits, do make deletes a bit more complicated.
Click through for an example of this, as well as a quick discussion of cascading deletes, which sound really useful until you make a big mistake. The other problem with cascading deletes is, even if you do intend to delete everything noted, the process is a lot slower than what you can do in batches, and you’re liable to increase the size of your transaction log file to boot.