Soft delete is a pretty common feature in most of the applications. It may increase complexity of the queries, nevertheless, not deleting anything might be a right default as the data might prove to be useful in the future: for restoring if a record was removed by mistake, to derive some conclusions based on statistics and plenty of other purposes. It may seem like it’s a pretty trivial thing: just adding a column like deleted_at and filtering out records that have this value present. But what happens when you need to do some proper uniqueness validation on both model layer and database level? Let’s take a look what kind of problem can easily be overlooked and how it can be solved with a conditional index.

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