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

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 ? There are pros and cons to both ways.(As you pointed out with moving the records to another table)

I allways prefer flagging the records. The draw back with flagging the records is that you might sacrifice some speed(depends on the number of records in the table.) If the table does not grow that fast most def just flag the records as deleted. my2c worth -- Arno Coetzee Developer Flash Media Group Office : 2712 342 7595 Mobile : 2782 693 6180