In SQL Server 2005, can I do a cascade delete without setting the property on my tables?

Question

I have a database full of customer data. It\'s so big that it\'s really cumbersome to operate on, and I\'d rather just slim it down to 10% of the customers, which is plenty

Answer 1

I usually just hand write the queries to delete the records I don't want and save that as a .sql file for future reference. The pseudocode is:

1. select id's of records from the main table that I want to delete into a temp table
2. write a delete query for each related table which joins to the temp table.
3. write a delete query for the main table joining to my temp table.