Consider I have a one-to-many relationship (in this context - ActiveRecord - association). When I remove an owner object (is at the "one-" side) what will happen to the owned objects? They will be deleted if I gave "dependent" option. But if not what will happen? Will their foreign keys be nullified? Thanks, Gábor PS.: I''ve been working a lot with Apple''s WebObjects. In that I had three (or four) options what to do when I remove an owner: 1. nullify: putt null to foreign keys 2. delete: remove dependent objects if owner removed 3. cascade: remove all dependent objects not just at the first level but recursively all 4. do nothing: it''s easy to think of what it does :)