`active' flag or not?

Question

OK, so practically every database based application has to deal with \"non-active\" records. Either, soft-deletions or marking something as \"to be ignored\". I\'m curious a

Answer 1

No - this is a pretty common thing - couple of variations depending on specific requirements (but you already covered them):

1) If you expect to have a whole BUNCH of data - like multiple terabytes or more - not a bad idea to archive deleted records immediately - though you might use a combination approach of marking as deleted then copying to archive tables.

2) Of course the option to hard delete a record still exists - though us developers tend to be data pack-rats - I suggest that you should look at the business process and decide if there is now any need to even keep the data - if there is - do so... if there isn't - you should probably feel free just to throw the stuff away.....again, according to the specific business scenario.