AVOIDING THE SOFT DELETE ANTI-PATTERN

Summary from the TLDR newsletter

Programmers hate deleting things, leading people to advocate for soft deletion, where instead of really deleting a record, you add a field that marks the record as deleted. This is generally a bad idea and there are a number of better ways to ensure access to old data. This article discusses why soft deletion is a problem and discusses several alternatives that may better meet the needs of developers.