[unemployable]

Everybody always did soft deletes with the is_deleted column at companies I once worked for so that is what I would do. I noticed that a lot of bugs would occur this way because you would forget to add the is_deleted to the query somewhere. The queries were also longer due to the longer where clause and so on.

These days I use a deleted table as per the article as I decided it would be better to deal with the more complex undelete process. It keeps that process to a single section instead of spreading it all throughout your database.

Some of the suggestions here like "use views" don't really work for two reasons - sometimes the is_deleted check must be performed in the ON clause, not in the WHERE clause, and sometimes you want to count the deleted or show the deleted, while other times you don't.