How would you design soft delete in an EF Core-backed API, and what problems can it create?

Design a safe soft-delete strategy in EF Core APIs

Explains soft delete in EF Core APIs with practical .NET data-access examples and production trade-offs.

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Soft delete means marking a row as deleted instead of physically removing it. For example, the table may have IsDeleted and DeletedAt columns. The API hides those records from normal queries, often with a global query filter. This helps with recovery and audit scenarios.

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Understanding of soft delete in EF Core APIs, EF Core/SQL behavior, API boundaries, production risks, and practical debugging or design judgment.

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Explain soft delete in EF Core APIs with practical .NET data-access examples and production trade-offs. It matters in real backend work because query shape, indexes, transactions, locking, and data volume can turn harmless-looking code into a production bottleneck. The practical angle is soft delete in EF Core APIs, EF Core/SQL behavior, API boundaries, production risks, and practical debugging or design judgment, tied to a concrete production decision.
Soft delete means marking a row as deleted instead of physically removing it. For example, the table may have IsDeleted and DeletedAt columns. The API hides those records from normal queries, often with a global query filter. This helps with recovery and audit scenarios.
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Treating soft delete in EF Core APIs as a syntax detail instead of a production behavior.
Not checking generated SQL, query plans, or actual data volume.
Testing only with tiny local data and assuming production will behave the same.
Fixing symptoms with caching, timeouts, or retries before understanding the data-access cause.

How would you design soft delete in an EF Core-backed API, and what problems can it create?

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