Gustav Brock
gustav at cactus.dk
Sat Feb 1 12:57:00 CST 2003
Hi Arthur > .. I would never be so foolish as to turn cascade-delete on anywhere > in any serious database :-) That's a pity 'cause that's a very powerful tool! Of course, as with fire and other potential dangerous tools, you must know what you're doing and take your precautions. Most listers, I'm sure, will vote with me that you indeed know what you are dealing with, and I'm under the impression that you are a frequent user of database modelling tools - so what's the trouble? Before someone jumps on me with some horror story of unintended deleted records let me stress that there are many (trivial) cases where cascade-delete must be avoided; but for automatic cleaning of linking tables or subtables it's a wonderful tool set to force with zero code. (Cascade-update is another story. I've never found a use for that except when using natural keys which I avoid by all means.) /gustav