For some applications this is fine, depending on your app/business logic but for a lot of applications states like active/pending/suspended and "deleted" are no

For some applications this is fine, depending on your app/business logic but for a lot of applications states like active/pending/suspended and "deleted" are not mutually exclusive. Suppose I soft-delete an active, pending, or suspended user using your scheme. Now I need to un-delete the user. What status should they have? We don't know. This is another "best practice" I've learned over the years. Those flags/statuses you think are mutually exclusive? Maybe they aren't. Or maybe they are now but won't always be. It's usually easier in the long run to give each status its own column even if you think they'll always be mutually exclusive. Because I mean, what are you really saving? A few bytes per record? In most cases that's not worth it.