Sometimes you want to mark a DB table record as deleted instead of deleting it permanently, right?
How do you do that?
So far I’ve been using a boolean “deleted” field but I’m not sure if it’s a good apprach.
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Sometimes you want to mark a DB table record as deleted instead of deleting it permanently, right?
How do you do that?
So far I’ve been using a boolean “deleted” field but I’m not sure if it’s a good apprach.
That’s about it – a boolean field to indicate that the record is deleted. The few times I used that, I called that field
IsDeleted.This is often referred to as Logical Delete.
It’s up to you to respect that field in your reports – which means excluding all the records with
IsDeleted = true. Those queries can get a little complicated if you have a lot of tables and relations.Also, you may encounter some problems if you have unique constraints on a table. For example, if in a user table a user has
IsDeleted = trueand the email column is unique, i would not be possible to add a new user with same email address.There are some ORM which take those fields into consideration – for example, SubSonic 2.2 will not delete a record if there is a column named ‘Deleted’ or ‘IsDeleted’, instead it will set this field to true.
Some related resources:
As an alternative to this you could add auditing tables.