Soft Deletion Will Complicate Your Application

Here are the workarounds and an alternative

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The data generated by a software application is valuable. This is also true for data that can be deleted from the application. Keeping deleted data around can help in tracking data history, trends, and relationships between data. On top of that, some parts of the application might be able to make use of deleted historical data.

As a result, a lot of software applications are designed in such a way that data is never actually deleted. One of the popular approaches for accomplishing this is Soft Deletion. Even though this approach looks simple, it often leads to complications. Here, we will look at what makes Soft Deletion complicated. We will also look at an alternative approach to Soft Deletion and it’s own pros and cons.

Supporting Soft Deletion

To support Soft Deletion, we simply add a new field to the schema. A record is flagged as deleted depending on the value of this field. For example, we might have the following schema for the users table:

id: string
username: string
password: string
created_date: Date
deleted: boolean

In the above example, any user who has the deleted field set to true is considered as deleted.