Comment by tliltocatl
11 hours ago
Except almost every database (and most storage devices nowadays) works this way - mark an entry as deleted, then batch delete a lot of entries during garbage collection. It's fundamentally impossible to efficiently erase a record from the middle of a file, except maybe by using an encryption tree, which would still be fairly inefficient.
Actually erasing data is quite hard. Soft deletes doesn't add any new lies, they just move the lies to the upper layer.
Come on. With a manual "marked as deleted" it stays as this forever, it is not deleted and never will, and the "deleted" data lands also in database backups, is still query-able and so on. I do not care if the deleted data stays for a while on disk or in memory as long it will be eventually deleted by the garbage collector and isn't query-able anymore.