Cascade on delete performance: Whats the fastest way to delete a row its 1-Many rows?

Question

I have a database in which there is a parent \"Account\" row that then has a 1-Many relationship with another table, and that table has a 1-Many relationship with another table.

Answer 1

A delete is a delete, and if you want to delete massive amounts of rows (100k), it will take a while.

If you do a soft delete (set a status to "D" for example) you can then run a job to actually delete the rows in batches of say 1,000 or so over time it may work better for you. The soft delete should update only the header row and would be very fast. You'd need to code your application to ignore these "D" status rows and their children though.

EDIT To further @Kane's comment. you could only do a soft delete, or you could do a soft delete followed by a batch process to do the actual deletes if you really want to. I'd just stick with the soft deletes if drive space is not an issue.