`active' flag or not?

Question

OK, so practically every database based application has to deal with \"non-active\" records. Either, soft-deletions or marking something as \"to be ignored\". I\'m curious a

Answer 1

We use both methods for dealing with inactive records. The method we use is dependent upon the situation. For records that are essentially lookup values, we use the Active bit field. This allows us to deactivate entries so they wont be used, but also allows us to maintain data integrity with relations.

We use the "move to separation table" method where the data is no longer needed and the data is not part of a relation.