Archiving information is a very complex topic, because of the relationships of tables to each other.
In the example shown in the article, the unsuspecting user may save the basic information about an employee (name, date of birth, social security #), but will lose ALL the information associated with this employee kept in other tables, which might include: payroll information, job titles held and dates of service, etc.
A developer doesn’t arbitrarily set the properties between tables when ensuring Referential Integrity. If Cascading Deletes was NOT set, it was for a reason! The developer did this to prevent the deletion of the parent record when child records existed in other tables. You just don’t around blithely changing this to make it easier for you.
