Thank you for the explanation! 😊

I’m still in doubt of what a tankie is, even though I’ve now seen it mentioned 1000 times. Also why is it called that?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

This is any company, government, or other organisation with +80 employees. The two other alternatives are

1. Have all data in Excel with no data governance, robust procedures, or trust in data, as the organisation grows in size
2. Use only external tools (which in turn are owned by organisations that work like I described in my parent comment)

I’d love to hear of there’s other ways of doing this stuff that actually works, but so far I just haven’t experienced it in my career yet.

As a person working in a field close to data engineering this sounds like they’re actually honest about the process.

Tldr: it’s not possible to “just delete” everything at once, even though we’d love to be able to.

There’s so many layers of where information is stored, and such insane amounts of data in their data platform. so running a clean up job to delete a single persons data in oltp databases, data lakes, dwh’s, backups, etc, would both be expensive and inefficient. Instead what they then do is to do it in stages: flip a flag somewhere (is_deleted = true) which lets it be removed from view initially, and then running periodic clean-up jobs.