In some cases a soft delete is the only option. Say I run a chain of stores and wish to close a particular store mid year. The existing sales data still needs to reference the now closed store, but any other attempt to interact with the store should be prevented.
The application and its use of data must take this into account. I don't believe there is some magic bullet here. However, audit tables are invaluable for tracking changes and culprits.
Eventually, the store and all its data can be deleted using cascade delete to maintain referential integrity.
I work as a consultant at a company that has had their entire programming/system staff resign over the last year. Most of the replacement staff have now also resigned. The reason is toxic management.
When people are facing life/death consequences from Covid it puts shit at work into perspective. Enough already!
What the enthusiasts for heap pump water heaters miss is the source of the heat they are pumping.
In the summer they are removing heat from a hot house, great - free air conditioning.
In the winter they are removing heat from a warm house, which then needs to be replaced by some other heating source to keep the house warm, great - you get to pay twice.
I tried turning the heat pump element on my heater off during the winter. However, it is programmed to automatically turn on again after 5 days.
For business applications, formal methods are really limited to core algorithms.
The real problem is that data entry and validation should be a solved problem. Sadly this is not the case. Try using .Net WPF or React and your only recourse is to Stack Overflow. These frameworks are over complicated and are full of weird edge cases that make everyday programming tedious and error prone.
Lets get our house in order before we break out the temporal logic.
Early last year I remember reading that the Wuhan lab had a period of several days when no cell phone traffic occurred.
This was postulated to be due to an evacuation of the lab. This has not be repeated recently or mentioned as evidence of a breach.
The application and its use of data must take this into account. I don't believe there is some magic bullet here. However, audit tables are invaluable for tracking changes and culprits.
Eventually, the store and all its data can be deleted using cascade delete to maintain referential integrity.