Re: Best practices for deleting and restoring records - moving vs flagging

On Thu, Aug 11, 2005 at 10:47:09AM -0700, Saqib Ali wrote: > Hello All, > > What are best practices for deleting records in a DB. We need the > ability to restore the records. > > Two obvious choices are: > > 1) Flag them deleted or undeleted > 2) Move the deleted records to seperate table for deleted records. > > We have a complex schema. However the the records that need to be > deleted and restored reside in 2 different tables (Table1 and Table2). > > Table2 uses the primary key of the Table1 as the Foriegn key. The > Primary key for Table1 is auto-generated. This make the restoring with > the same primary key impossible, if we move deleted data to a > different table. However if we just flag the record as deleted the > restoring is quite easy. > > Any thoughts/ideas ? > > -- > In Peace, > Saqib Ali > http://www.xml-dev.com/blog/ > Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better. > I like the approach of marking them as deleted. It's easy to modify the SELECT query to ignore deleted records, plus it's easy to restore them if you need them. -- Jim Kaufman Linux Evangelist public key 0x6D802619 CCNA, CISSP# 65668 --- Kato, what is going on in that little yellow brain of yours? -- Chief Inspector Clouseau, in reference to a priceless white Steinway piano.