Comment by pmontra

> what happens if customers have purchased that product? You still want it in the database, and you still want to fulfill the orders placed.

You might still want to show to those customers their purchase history including what they bought 25 years ago. For example, my ISP doesn't have anymore that 10 Mb/s fiber optic product I bought im 2000, because it was superseded by 100 Mb/s products and then by 1 Gb/s ones. It's also not my ISP anymore but I use it for the SIM in my phone. That also accumulated a number of product changes along the years.

And think about the inventory of eshops with a zillion products and the archive of the pady orders. Maybe they keep the last few years, maybe everything until the db gets too large.