> Some ORMs or ORM plugins make this easier by automatically chaining the extra deleted_at clause onto every query (see acts_as_paranoid for example), but just because it’s hidden doesn’t necessarily make things better. If an operator ever queries the database directly they’re even more likely to forget deleted_at because normally the ORM does the work for them.
I ran into this exact issue last month. Very common for places to have a general "soft delete unless you have a good reason not to" policy, and very common for people to forget about the deletion flag when writing joins by hand or doing reporting.
True, but in that case I wonder the reason why you or anyone else has such direct access to such data. ETL would eliminate such things for a data lake before anyone would run ad-hoc queries (that could and likely do) contains PII and other privileged data.
Well, for one thing, there are countless software systems worked on by hundreds of thousands of developers which will never include a data lake or any ETL more complex than "a programmer writes a script to generate a CSV and upload it/email it somewhere".
> Some ORMs or ORM plugins make this easier by automatically chaining the extra deleted_at clause onto every query (see acts_as_paranoid for example), but just because it’s hidden doesn’t necessarily make things better. If an operator ever queries the database directly they’re even more likely to forget deleted_at because normally the ORM does the work for them.
I ran into this exact issue last month. Very common for places to have a general "soft delete unless you have a good reason not to" policy, and very common for people to forget about the deletion flag when writing joins by hand or doing reporting.