Relatedly, I've worked with systems that would maintain a "deleted" or "archived" table for every normal table, with an identical schema. I nowadays prefer it over a deleted_at field for many of the same reasons as the article.

I also nowadays don't care much for created_at or updated_at; IMO it's preferable to maintain an actual transaction log (which is something I'd add to the YPGNI list, given how invaluable that tends to be for auditing purposes).

Thanks for the reminder -- I forgot one of the great benefits of soft deletes that I posted in that conversation. If your customer support can quickly investigate and resolve false reports of "my data disappeared without me deleting it" then they can pass along the rarer more mysterious cases to engineering, a lot of which will be real bugs. With hard deletes, all the reports look the same to customer support, so nothing gets passed on to engineering (or worse, everything does.)