[whalesalad]

A good solution here (can be) to utilize a view. The underlying table has soft-delete field and the view will hide rows that have been soft deleted. Then the application doesn't need to worry about this concern all over the place.

[elyobo]

postgres with rls to hide soft deleted records means that most of the app code doesn't need to know or care about them, still issues reads, writes, deletes to the same source table and as far as the app knows its working

[Ronsenshi]

I would also say that most modern ORMs and frameworks also either come with soft delete feature (with automatic filtering on all queries) as part of the package or there are third-party libraries available for ORMs adding this functionality without the hassle of dealing with views (maybe it's me, but I've never had good experience with DB views).