_People who know of my work in the Windows world sometimes ask me how I, a “real" programmer and former Microsoft MVP, could become so involved with Salesforce development. I thought I’d write a different kind of article highlighting one of the Salesforce platform features that I find compelling—and that makes Salesforce, for me, a serious platform for software development. Instead of the usual “dry” technical article, I present to you a story - a work of fiction (except for the technology, which is all true). _

My housemate’s voice just barely infringed on my attention. “They deleted a field!” he yelled.

It wasn’t enough to distract me from my latest binge-watching effort.

“THEY DELETED A FIELD!”

The second time I couldn’t ignore him. I turned around to find quite a sight. He was on his feet shouting at the screen. Worse yet, he disturbed the cat, who decided I was the safest refuge. I reached for another allergy pill. Why we got a cat given my allergies, I have no idea.

“What’s going on?” I asked, trying to sound supportive. We’d both been working from home, sheltering in place for several months now, and I counted myself lucky — we still got along. Still, better him shouting at some remote miscreant than at me. “Who deleted what?”

He took a deep breath and explained. “Part of my client’s application went down yesterday, and they’ve been yelling at me to fix it,” he started. “It uses an Object Relationship Mapping library to make it easy to code against the database, and I was thinking it might have changed during a recent update. But it turns out that one of the client’s DBAs decided that a particular database column was no longer needed, and removed it.” He shook his head. “I just can’t believe it.”

Okay, I’m a nice guy, but I couldn’t resist.“I can’t believe it either – it has to be something else. You can’t delete a column that’s in use.”

“Of course you can’t, that’s why it failed,” he explained.

“No, you can’t," I said. "It’s not possible. If the column is in use, the database won’t let you delete it.”

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