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Soft Deletes in SQL Server

Erik Darling has some thoughts on soft deletes:

Implementing soft deletes for an app that’s been around for a while can be tough. In the same way as implementing Partitioning can be tough to add in later to get data management value from (rebuilding clustered indexes on the scheme, making sure all nonclustered indexes are aligned, and all future indexes are too, and making sure you have sufficient partitions at the beginning and end for data movement).

Read the whole thing. Incidentally, this also ties well into a recent post by Erik about deleting into a different table. It can be easier to implement soft deletes as deleting from the current table and adding to an archive table. That gives you the benefits of keeping deleted data while not running into some of the problems Erik mentions. And if you want to undo a deletion? Delete from the archive table and insert back into the main table.