[patio11]

A million inserts into a table a year is causing performance problems? Assuming 200 work days and all accesses being in a four hour period that is about one row inserted every three seconds. DBs are not my bag, baby, but that presumably should not be killing you.

At the day job, when we do a soft delete as defined here, we tend to create a view of the active rows in the table. Accessing through the view rather than the table prevents many of the "Whoopsie, missed a WHERE clause, now I'm summing over deleted records" errors. I'm told it also improves performance but take anything I say about DBs with a grain of salt.

[bmj]

We use soft deletes in our system (primarily because we have to maintain all data), and we use views to retrieve results. The views also flatten the data a bit, joining appropriate tables, which again simplifies queries.