alt Hacker NewsMaybe my intuition is wrong, but to me this sounds like a violation of the principle of least power.
"Soft deletes" is just a name for a regular write operation, with specific semantics.
Adding a layer of magic to the DB for this doesn't seem right to me.
And applications could have many different requirements for soft deletes, like the article points out. For example, the simplest version would be just a boolean "deleted" column, but it could also be "deleted_at", "deleted_by", etc.
All of these cases require an bunch of code changes anyway, and the more complex ones could interfere with an implementation of this feature at the database level: such a transparent implementation couldn't access app-specific concerns such as user data, for example.
Adding soft deletes to a legacy app that knows nothing about it would only work for a boolean flag and a maybe date-time value, unless the DBMS would also offer triggers for soft deletes etc?
Seems to me to that this capability would make a DBMS much more complicated.
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>Adding soft deletes to a legacy app
As an aside, I've never found this to be worth it since you have to change too much and re-test everything for minimal user benefit and time savings. The effort is way worse if the code is not great in the first place. It can be a great decision to make before everything is written.
Maybe it's worth it for files which are hard to reproduce, but you can also rely on DB backups to get those back. If people are regularly deleting things they're not supposed to, you're better off removing the user-facing delete actions, limiting the action to specific users, etc.
I don't think it's all magic because you have to implement soft deletes in your application layer and it would be nice to have a little DB support for it. It doesn't have to be some big thing, just the ability for selects and such to work only on undeleted elements by default unless you ask for them would be nice so it doesn't pollute your code and make you have to always remember to point the gun away from your foot.