I suppose "on delete cascade" would fire appropriate triggers in the downstream tables, and "on delete set null" will take care of upstream and peer tables. If

I suppose "on delete cascade" would fire appropriate triggers in the downstream tables, and "on delete set null" will take care of upstream and peer tables. If this is not sufficient, and a live record in one table may legitimately refer to a "dead" record in another table, then well, maybe "soft delete" is what you need, and your data just has a deactivated state.