Reasons to maintain FKs on an empty, deprecated table? So I have a few dozen empty tables with foreign keys to other, populated tables. These tables are not being accessed by any CRUD operations, but have about 6-12 months before they can be unlinked from Entity Framework applications (due to project timelines) and so are sticking around for a while.

These tables will definitely never be used again and any relationships are already documented / unnecessary to retain.

Does dropping these foreign keys have any benefits?
The FK would still need to check with the empty table to see if the key was used on a delete operation.  But this would be a quick check and never deny if the table is empty.