Comment by KronisLV

> I've seen tables where 50%-70% were soft-deleted, and it did affect the performance noticeably.

I think we largely need support for "soft deletes" to be baked into SQL or its dialects directly and treated as something transparent (selecting soft deleted rows = special case, regular selects skip those rows; support for changing regular DELETE statements into doing soft deletes under the hood).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41272903

And then make dynamically sharding data by deleted/not deleted really easy to configure.

You soft deleted a few rows? They get moved to another DB instance, an archive/bin of sorts. Normal queries wouldn't even consider it, only when you explicitly try to select soft deleted rows would it be reached out to.