Need Advice - Soft Deletes of Rows

I am a humble programmer programming a straight forward C/S system with Delphi 3 and Oracle 7.3. When a user deletes a row from a table I want the deletion to be a soft delete so that if they change their mind they can undo the delete and restore the row. The traditional way of doing this is to set up a flag field to indicate whether the row has been marked for deletion. I have two questions:

1. Is there a smarter way of doing this in Oracle?
2. If there isn't, how do you handle the case where the user wants to flag for deletion a row that has child rows (i.e. has rows that reference it in a foreign key)? I would not want to allow this, but how can I tell if a row has child rows before I try to delete it and Oracle raises an error message?

I would be very grateful for any advice anyone has on these issues!

Thanks

Doug White Received on Sat Jul 11 1998 - 19:02:28 CDT