korrents

korrents · piece

Soft Deletion Probably Isn't Worth It

Brandur Leach · 19 Jul 2022

Read the piece on brandur.org ↗

2 korrents from this piece ↓

Brandur Leach did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

  1. Our reading

    Soft deletion makes a database worse by bleeding deletion logic into every query and rendering foreign keys mostly useless.

    Their wordsThe first is that soft deletion logic bleeds out into all parts of your code.

  2. Our reading

    Soft deletion is rarely used to actually undelete data, because deletion has side effects that a flag cannot reverse.

    Their wordsAs far as I'm aware, never once, in ten plus years, did anyone at any of these places ever actually use soft deletion to undelete something.

Keep reading