Soft deletion probably isn't worth it
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Soft deletion probably isn't worth it
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Re: Soft deletion probably isn't worth it
#2Soft deletion is certainly very situationally worth it. I've found the most value when 1. it is well supported at the ORM layer and 2. business requirements dictate strong auditability of data. While I have undeleted items on occasion, I've used soft deletes more frequently to debug and build a timeline of events around the data.
For context, I've worked in fintech where I often needed to review backoffice approvals, transactions, offers, etc.
Re: Soft deletion probably isn't worth it
#3"The concept behind soft deletion is to make deletion safer, and reversible."
That's one part. The other part is that in many industries you have regulatory data retention and audit requirements. This is arguably the most valuable and common reason to perform Logical deletes.
Re: Soft deletion probably isn't worth it
#4Soft deletion is certainly very situationally worth it. I've found the most value when 1. it is well supported at the ORM layer and 2. business requirements dictate strong auditability of data. While I have undeleted items on occasion, I've used soft deletes more frequently to debug and build a timeline of events around the data. For context, I've worked in fintech where I often needed to review backoffice approvals,…
Yep, we have an abstraction layer on top of the ORM to provide common queries. "Give me all X" will always return stuff not soft deleted. Data people also like to go diving through old data, and without getting into data warehousing and stuff like that, it's not too complex to support a single flag to enable us to keep old stuff.
Re: Soft deletion probably isn't worth it
#5Soft deletion is certainly very situationally worth it. I've found the most value when 1. it is well supported at the ORM layer and 2. business requirements dictate strong auditability of data. While I have undeleted items on occasion, I've used soft deletes more frequently to debug and build a timeline of events around the data. For context, I've worked in fintech where I often needed to review backoffice approvals,…
In my limited experience, soft deletion also has better prospects where partial indexes are involved, since it reduces the size of the index and reduces search and insert time a little bit. If soft deletes are rare, you aren't going to see much of a payback for your investment in code complexity.
And since you can never really be sure what you'll need 2 years from now, I imagine there are a lot of anecdotes out there of people who implemented it thinking it would be used a lot, and turned out to be wrong.
Re: Soft deletion probably isn't worth it
#6"The concept behind soft deletion is to make deletion safer, and reversible." That's one part. The other part is that in many industries you have regulatory data retention and audit requirements. This is arguably the most valuable and common reason to perform Logical deletes.
I think billions have been spent bridging the gap between “ideal” software and what businesses actually need. Access control is another thing I see developers wanting to simplify or push to implement later, but is actually a key feature.
Re: Soft deletion probably isn't worth it
#7"The concept behind soft deletion is to make deletion safer, and reversible." That's one part. The other part is that in many industries you have regulatory data retention and audit requirements. This is arguably the most valuable and common reason to perform Logical deletes.
I would argue that in many cases the concept behind soft deletion is to make deletion permanent.
Hard deletes retain no memory of what you wanted to be gone, so any malfunctioning sync process will continuously recreate the deleted record soon after it's deleted. Soft deletes are often the only way to make sure deleted records don't reappear.
Re: Soft deletion probably isn't worth it
#8[deleted]
Re: Soft deletion probably isn't worth it
#9Soft deletion is certainly very situationally worth it. I've found the most value when 1. it is well supported at the ORM layer and 2. business requirements dictate strong auditability of data. While I have undeleted items on occasion, I've used soft deletes more frequently to debug and build a timeline of events around the data. For context, I've worked in fintech where I often needed to review backoffice approvals,…
Yep, we have an abstraction layer on top of the ORM to provide common queries. "Give me all X" will always return stuff not soft deleted. Data people also like to go diving through old data, and without getting into data warehousing and stuff like that, it's not too complex to support a single flag to enable us to keep old stuff.
They might like to, but you should definitely consider if saving data no longer required for your business violates privacy regulation/ethical considerations.
Re: Soft deletion probably isn't worth it
#10"The concept behind soft deletion is to make deletion safer, and reversible." That's one part. The other part is that in many industries you have regulatory data retention and audit requirements. This is arguably the most valuable and common reason to perform Logical deletes.
Why not just use an audit table, to keep from littering your indices?