paranoia

The use case for using the database here is overblown. I've never experienced of heard of anyone using a view for the users table. I suppose it may exist in the wild somewhere. I wouldn't avoid Ruby features because the applications I develop are in Ruby and it would require a complete rewrite anyway. I avoid the database because there are development speed advantages to using Rails features. And everything works together nicely assuming you do things the Rails way. https://github.com/rubysherpas/paranoia > If a record has has_many associations defined AND those associations have dependent: :destroy set on them, then they will also be soft-deleted if acts_as_paranoid is set, otherwise the normal destroy will be called. It's convenient.

https://github.com/rubysherpas/paranoia is enough to solve problems at very large scales. There is nothing about Rails or MVC preventing someone from doing this. This is a very common design principle for all kind of ERP and BPM systems: don't ever delete anything.

That's a very valid concern. My personal opinion: Yes, the package system is pretty small. That's why it depends what kind of project you are gonna write and how much time you have. Ruby has a lot of gems, but many of them are buggy and deprecated... Proof: https://github.com/rubysherpas/paranoia I think that Elixir is gonna catch up. If you write a project where you need to use a lot of external libraries probably Ruby is better. If you don't need to rely on the external dependencies too much and you want to/have to write your own code(libs), imo, Elixir is a better option. It also depends on a project, lots of external api calls, webhooks, real time chatrooms, etc. I think Elixir is gonna be a better option. One thing more, because Elixir's code is much easier to deal with, it's easier to fork and fix deprecated lib than in Ruby(Rails).

Typically you and your users are rarely going to say "I wish this data had been deleted" you will run in to situations where you and your users will say "I wish that wasn't deleted" I rarely design an app to delete anything. Soft Deletes are pretty standard in development and I would recommend going that route unless sensitive data is involved and there is a reason to worry about data being retained as a bad thing. For Rails: https://github.com/rubysherpas/paranoia For Laravel: https://laravel.com/docs/5.3/eloquent#soft-deleting

There is a popular Ruby gem which addresses this sort of concern: https://github.com/rubysherpas/paranoia Essentially it doesn't delete but gives the impression to the user that it deletes. I like this idea because it really does guard against mistakes. I'm not sure if you have an ethical/moral concern with retaining data that a user thinks is deleted but that's another thing altogether (Personally, I don't.)