I recently found myself in a database mess where management wants to remove data from the database, but still wants this data to appear in other places. Example: they want to delete all instances of a whizbang product, but they still want whizbang to appear in sales reports. (if they ran one for the previous date).
Now I can add a field, say, is_deleted, which will track whether this product has been deleted and thereby save all my links, but over time I have the potential to store a lot of dead data. (data that is never available again). How to deal with this is not my question.
I am curious to know, in your experience, what is the average life span of data? That is, on average, how long is the data live or good before they are replaced or deleted? I understand that this refers to the type of data that you post, but, of course, all the data has some kind of life?
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