Comment by rawgabbit

I have worked with databases my entire career. I hate triggers with a passion. The issue is no one “owns” or has the authority to keep triggers clean. Eventually triggers become a dumping ground for all sorts of nasty slow code.

I usually tell people to stop treating databases like firebase and wax on/wax off records and fields willy nilly. You need to treat the database as the store of your business process. And your business processes demand retention of all requests. You need to keep the request to soft delete a record. You need to keep a request to undelete a record.

Too much crap in the database, you need to create a field saying this record will be archived off by this date. On that date, you move that record off into another table or file that is only accessible to admins. And yes, you need to keep a record of that archival as well. Too much gunk in your request logs? Well then you need to create an archive process for that as well.

These principles are nothing new. They are in line with “Generally Accepted Record Keeping Principles” which are US oriented. Other countries have similar standards.