Personal opinion is that have the 'system' help by managing things like 'delete flags' is opening the door to difficult debugging. Given the nature of a global state like DELETED ON/OFF simple errors of ommission by anyone working on the app can lead to long hours of ....... I have always thought it best to take responsibility for the state of data rows and add a rstatus c(1), added_on date, and added_by (userid). This way you always run with SET DELETE OFF (Rushmore likes this) and the one char rstatus allows 255 states for a row from active to voided, pending, etc. You also get to track data much like bank transactions (who did it when) s all applications-nothing is ever DELETED and history can always be recovered, backup and archive are similarly handled.
Just my opinion - all style are valid here.
Gary