I don't design schemas everyday, but when I do, I try to setup cascade updates/deletes correctly to make administration easier. I understand how cascades work, but I can never remember which table is which.
For example, if I have two tables - Parent and Child - with a foreign key on Child that references Parent and has ON DELETE CASCADE, which records trigger a cascade and which records get deleted by the cascade? My first guess would be the Child records get deleted when Parent records are deleted, since Child records depend on Parent records, but the ON DELETE is ambiguous; it could mean delete the Parent record when the Child record is deleted, or it could mean delete the Child record when the Parent is deleted. So which is it?
I wish the syntax was ON PARENT DELETE, CASCADE, ON FOREIGN DELETE, CASCADE or something similar to remove the ambiguity. Does anyone have any mnemonics for remembering this?
