This was very helpful, and i did manage to get everything to work, but i am still a little leery of using it, naturally.
I have only one use for it right now, which is to delete a long list of category names that cog imported by a faulty use of easy populate.

I have emptied the categories such there are no products for them, but it would be nice to be able to just delete the wayward elements in the categories table, and I assume i would have to do category descriptions table as well. but as everything is linked together in ways only the gods really understand, i wonder if there is more to it?