[EdwardDiego]

It's an approach I've seen before that can work nicely - often when you want to retain records for auditing/compliance purposes that refer to a deleted entity.

But I'd usually consider soft delete alongside this approach, as it always really depends on what you're doing and what your needs are - if you constantly query the dependent records joined to the entity you may or may not delete, then a deleted entity table means you now need to left join two tables when before you could inner join one table. So soft delete might be simpler.

But if that's a rare use case, then soft delete might be more complex depending on how many separate codepaths are querying the primary entity.

My next blog post should be called "It depends - avoiding the overly broad generalisations anti-pattern".