Re: Orphaned tupels, should I clean or is it ok to leave?

>> It is enough to drive a DBA completely freaking insane...Is this sort of
thing common in CRM packages?  <<

I don't know about CRM packages, but I worked for a company that did
the same kind of crappy coding in Configuration Management software.
I reviewed a municipal public works package which only had IDENTITY
columns for keys and absolutely no column constraints. I am no longer
amazed at the level of cowboy coding in packages.

>> When a PK is deleted, rather than ON DELETE CASCADE, it looks like any
logical references to it are simply set to NULL..  <<

Done manually, instead of with ON DELETE SET NULL?  You probably don't
remember pre_RDBMS databases, but they often had a bit flag at the
start of a record to mark it as active or deleted.  The reason that
records were located by physical position within a file or pointers of
some kind.  You would do explicit garbage collection every now and
then to re-claim the disk space and to re-build the pointer chains and
links.  Another form of flag for this purpose was to set a link to NIL
by traversing down a chain to the leaf nodes, then recursively back up
the chain to the parent record.