3 ms·

Counterpoint: https://brandur.org/soft-deletion https://brandur.org/soft-deletion HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32156009 https://news.yco

• dkarl 4y ago
  Thanks for the reminder -- I forgot one of the great benefits of soft deletes that I posted in that conversation. If your customer support can quickly investigate and resolve false reports of "my data disappeared without me deleting it" then they can pass along the rarer more mysterious cases to engineering, a lot of which will be real bugs. With hard deletes, all the reports look the same to customer support, so nothing gets passed on to engineering (or worse, everything does.)
• yellowapple 4y ago
  Relatedly, I've worked with systems that would maintain a "deleted" or "archived" table for every normal table, with an identical schema. I nowadays prefer it over a deleted_at field for many of the same reasons as the article. I also nowadays don't care much for created_at or updated_at; IMO it's preferable to maintain an actual transaction log (which is something I'd add to the YPGNI list, given how invaluable that tends to be for auditing purposes).
  • layer8 4y ago
    How about using YEGNI for “you’re eventually gonna need it”? Not exactly the same as “probably”, but more pronounceable.
    • yellowapple 4y ago
      I guess YUGNI (You're Usually Gonna Need It) would be close to the ideal intersection between pronouncability and original meaning.