Data engineering·Moving data out of the source
the delete arrives as a message with a key and no body, and a consumer that skips empty payloads keeps the row forever.
Tombstone record
Also calleddelete marker, null-value record
A record whose presence means 'this key no longer exists' — typically a key with a null value on a compacted topic. It is how deletion survives a system built out of upserts, and it is how compaction and downstream stores learn to drop something. Consumers written against the happy path routinely ignore them, which is the mechanism behind deleted customers who are still in the dashboard a year later.