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Comment by jelkand | Hacker News Reader

Soft 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.

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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.

Wouldn’t storing the deleted data in an immutable storage, with time stamp, be much better for auditability ? I mean how could you audit deleted, restored and deleted again data with that setup? Also, while I know it’s not really accurate, I tend to understand relations as sets, it makes me uncomfortable to have soft deleted data that are neither member or not member of the set.

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.

Definitely. When a user "deletes" their account, we null out all identifying fields to "DELETED_PII_$user_id". We have running metrics we compute that would go off the rails if we dropped the row completely.

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