I’m no DBA, but I respect database theory. Isn’t adding columns like isDeleted and sequenceOrder bad database practice?
I’m no DBA, but I respect database theory. Isn’t adding columns like isDeleted and
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I’m no DBA, but I respect database theory. Isn’t adding columns like isDeleted and sequenceOrder bad database practice?
That depends. Being able to soft-delete a tuple (i.e., mark it as deleted rather then actually deleting it) is essential if there’s any need to later access that tuple (e.g., to count deleted things, or do some type of historical analysis). It also has the possible benefit, depending on how indexes are structured, to cause less of a disk traffic hit when soft-deleting a row (by having to touch fewer indexes). The downside is that the application takes on responsibility for managing foreign keys to soft-deleting things.
If soft deleting is done for performance, a periodic (e.g., nightly, weekly) tasks can clean soft-deleted tuples out during a low-traffic period.
Using an explicit ‘sequence order’ for some tuples is useful in several cases, esp. when it’s not possible or wise to depend on some other field (e.g., ids, which app developers are trained not to trust) to order things that need to be ordered in some specific way for business reasons.