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.