[Gurgler]

There's a very legitimate case that I've seen made for soft-deletion in several different situations: foreign keys related to "created-by" columns. Hard-deleting a user who created an object that remains in use after they're gone would trigger referential integrity complaints on those columns. Without being able to reference a "deactivated" user's primary key in such a situation, you'd have to come up with some counterintuitive system for revisiting such objects. And the result (short of removing the foreign key) would be to give you inaccurate information about who created the object. Maybe one of you smarter people has already thought of an elegant way to handle this, but I've never seen one that satisfies my taste.

[unemployable]

Yeah that is the main problem with not using soft deletes. The question is though, if you delete a user, should the user's personal information still exist in your database, or does that violate some kind of privacy regulations? The idea of the deleted user's table is that it can be kept around and then pruned after x number of days to satisfy both privacy and undeleting. To keep the references around, I think one way might be to create two tables, so one table is used for all of the references and it stays around, and the other one gets deleted. Eg Account and User tables, or something.

[dubswithus]

There are Rails gems that can handle this in various ways.

But the easiest way is to deactivate the user account (is_active boolean) and continue to reference the user in internal records.

[whoomp12342]

thats exactly their point, is_active or deleted_at represents the same thing(just inverse).

However, if you DONT use an active/deleted flag, and instead do what the author suggests, I dont know the right way to support deleting said user

If you set the deleted_record table as part of a trigger on delete of other tables, you could turn on cascading delete and hope for the best. Outside of that I dont have any plan for using this with referential integrty.

It would be easy enough if you decided NOT to use referential integrity, but then you save the space of ONE user record and retain how many orphan records, making them all effectively soft deleted anyways... whats the point?