Re: storing deleted appoitments

[Rick James]

I can't say that one approach is decidedly better than another. Here are my opinions...

Plan A: Delete the row

Plan B: Keep the row, but flag it as deleted -- The business logic may require that you keep a record of it.

Plan C: Move the record to another table. This is clumsy, but it is the most efficient for other queries that need to look through still-valid records.

You need to do a cascading delete to get rid of the services tied to that appointment.

Plan X: Use ON DELETE CASCADE -- This ties you into Plan A, and needs to be thought through carefully to make sure that it does all the records, and not extra ones.

Plan Y: Write code in the API to do the work -- I trust this better. (That's a personal preference.) This also allows for flagging (Plan B) or moving (Plan C) the records instead of actually DELETEing them.