> Most early-stage startups use the (in 2008, when I did mine) best practice of “delete=1”. Changing your whole database over to permanent cascade delete is only easy if you’re a very experienced programmer or who knows what he’s doing.

If you can't handle cascading deletes, continue to set delete=1 and overwrite the other columns with random data / empty strings / whatever.

Less risky than implementing cascading deletes, but still effectively gets rid of PII.