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

Personally if you are going to leave the records in production, I would also leave them in development. Otherwise you may write code that works fine when the recordset is small but times out when faced with the real recordset.

But if you are determined to do this, I would copy the id field of the records you want to dete from the main table first to a work table. Then I would take each related table and write a delete joining to that worktable to only delete those records. Finish up with the parent table. Make sure this ia written in a script and saved so the next time you want to do a similar thing to your test data, you can easily run it without having to figure out what are the reated tables that need records deleted from them.