1

I have a scenario where I am holding personal data. For privacy reasons I need to ensure that I am not holding onto the personal data for too long. However, when a document is deleted a tombstone record is still kept on disk. After I delete a document, can I be sure that the personal data is completely destroyed?

Question: What information is stored in the 'tombstone' record?

Chris Snow
  • 23,813
  • 35
  • 144
  • 309

1 Answers1

1

The tombstone record only contains the following fields:

  • _deleted (boolean flag)
  • _id
  • _rev

Source: CouchDB document API

However, if you have stored sensitive data in the _id field, you may need to consider:

Finally, because we are talking about deleting records, be careful of workloads that generate a high ratio of deleted:active documents as this is considered an anti-pattern.

Community
  • 1
  • 1
Chris Snow
  • 23,813
  • 35
  • 144
  • 309
  • Also remember that for CouchDB you will need to call the `_compact` endpoint to remove the bodies of old document revisions. – Mike Rhodes Jun 29 '15 at 09:42