They are difficult but it shouldn’t be underestimated the cost of trying to keep consistency with the alternatives either.

I sometimes think that people ask the wrong question on this sort of thing - rather than thinking “what technical solution should I come up with” you should be thinking “what is the business requirement here, and what consistency guarantees are needed?”

In many cases you want to soft delete anyway and mark rows as stale rather than deleting them wholesale. Cascade deletes need to be very carefully thought about, as while they’re very handy they can be quite destructive if the relationships are not mapped out.

Personally having spent some time now in the microservices hole, I miss all the power SQL databases give you for this sort of thing. I think everyone should spend some time reading and digesting ‘Designing Data Intensive Applications’ and evaluating the trade offs in detail.