Re:Soft deletion probably isn't worth it
by nivertech on Thursday July 21, 2022 @02:49AM
(#32176520)
> That’s why we have protective measures like soft deleting and event sourcing
IMO soft deletion is a hack trying to fix problems in CRUD, which is a hack in itself.
CRUD attempts to model everything in the universe as a collections of mutable items, loosely based on RDBMS/SQL.
Event Sourcing is more realistic: it models everything as a append-only logs of immutable events/facts, which preserves both the historical data and, more importantly, the original intent.
Unlike CRUD, Event Sourcing is technology agnostic.
In my experience this happens “rarely”, not “always”.
It can happen, and in some ultra-rare cases the impact of not being able to recover some data might be huge (company-ending, even), and engineers are good at worrying about such edge cases. That’s why we habe protective measures like soft deleting and event sourcing - because of nightmare edge cases, not because we are always having to actually use them. It’s driven by engineers avoiding their worst nightmare: having to say “I’m sorry, I cannot solve this problem for you. The data is gone.” It’s a peace-of-mind thing, not an everyday-need thing.