What about the referential integrity?

Thanks for the explanation.

Briefly looking at cck_referential_integrity, it seems it can only clean the broken reference but the child record still remains there. It is not deleted and logically it is still an orphan.

Rules seem to be more flexible but I am not quite sure how to implement the behavior I need. Do I need to custom code something?

Thanks WorldFallz, where exactly do I put this piece of code and what configuration is required for that?

I did a little bit of digging and was surpised how easy it is with rules and the code supplied above. Thank you for this tip!

One more comment and one more question though:

Comment: The event I configured my rule for is called "After deleting content". I believe the word "after" is not accurate because if the deletion has already happened, the above code wouldn't have access to the "deleted" node's properties. A better name for that would be "Before deleting content" or "On deleting content" (I am borrowing some terminology from Oracle DRBMS)

Question: Is it somehow ensured that the deletion is done consistently in this case? Again in RDBMS terms: are the parent's and the children's deletion encapsulated in a single transaction? I don't know MySQL and the DB isolation layer that Drupal is using but if I had to do this in Oracle or some other major DB that supports transactions, my pseudo-code would look something like this:

BEGIN a transaction

  delete_the_children;

  delete_the_parent;

  COMMIT the transaction /* make DB changes available to other users and sessions */

EXCEPTION handling
  if an exception is raised then
    ROLLBACK the entire transaction so that either everything or nothing is deleted;
  end if;
END;

In other words what is going to hapen if during the process of deleting the children, the DB crashes? Will there be some children deleted, some not and the parent still there as well?