Avoiding the Soft Delete Anti-Pattern

Exploring the drawbacks of soft deletion and presenting better alternatives.

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  • Issues with Soft Deletion:
  • Misleading the database, causing integrity issues.
  • Complexity in querying and maintaining data.
  • Alternatives:
  • Hard delete with modern database recovery.
  • Lifecycle states for entities.
  • Temporal tables for complete historical records.
  • Offloading historical data to a data warehouse.