Every time I find myself writing code to delete data from a database I get nervous. What if I later determine that I needed this piece of information, after all? For example, what if having access to this data that was deleted would have helped me reproduce or debug an issue? Or what if the data can be useful for audit purposes in a future version of the application?

You can find lots of reasons to never delete records from your database. But obviously these records that you saved from permanent deletion need to be marked as being "less interesting" than the rest, so that you have something you can use to filter them out in queries. The Soft Delete pattern is one of the available options to implement deletions without actually deleting the data. It does it by adding an extra column to your database table(s) that keeps track of the deleted state of each of its rows. This sounds straightforward to implement, and strictly speaking it is, but the complications that derive from the use of soft deletes are far from trivial. In this article I will discuss some of these issues and how I avoid them in Flask and SQLAlchemy based applications.

If you work on a project that uses database migrations with other developers, it is likely that you have experienced migration conflicts at some point. These occur when two or more developers are merging unrelated features to the master source control branch at around the same time, with each feature requiring different changes to the database.

In this article, I'm going to describe the problem and its solution in detail, using an actual example based on my Flask-Migrate extension. While I will be using commands that are specific to Flask-Migrate and Alembic, the solution to the problem that I present here can be adapted to other database migration frameworks.

This is the tenth article in the series in which I document my experience writing web applications in Python using the Flask microframework.

The goal of the tutorial series is to develop a decently featured microblogging application that demonstrating total lack of originality I have decided to call microblog.

This is the ninth article in the series in which I document my experience writing web applications in Python using the Flask microframework.

The goal of the tutorial series is to develop a decently featured microblogging application that demonstrating total lack of originality I have decided to call microblog.

This is the eighth article in the series in which I document my experience writing web applications in Python using the Flask microframework.

The goal of the tutorial series is to develop a decently featured microblogging application that demonstrating total lack of originality I have decided to call microblog.

This is the fourth article in the series in which I document my experience writing web applications in Python using the Flask microframework.

The goal of the tutorial series is to develop a decently featured microblogging application that demonstrating total lack of originality I have decided to call microblog.