> It doesn't matter. The delete of the master and the cascading
> deletes of the children are a single operation and succeed or
> fail together. They can be executed in either order, since the
> sequence of the operation should not be visible outside of
> the operation.

This is what I'd expect from referential integrity.

> changing that behavior will be a major undertaking.

I am no expert on database engine internals, but some research on this
topic yielded the following excerpt from the Informix Guide to SQL
that highlights a similar case where a tradeoff seems to have been
made:
"Important:
You cannot define a DELETE trigger event on a table if the table
defines a referential constraint with ON DELETE CASCADE."