HAhardwaresofton·Jun 1, 2021
Yeah, just use a UUID unless the bits to store the UUID really are your driving limitation (they're not), having a UUID that is non-linear is almost always the most straight-forward option for identifying things, for the tradeoff of human readability (though you can get some of that back with prefixes and some other schemes). I'm not going to rehash the benefits that people have brought up for UUIDs, but they're in this thread. At this point what I'm concerned about is just... what is the best kind of UUID to use -- I've recently started using mostly v1 because time relationship is important to me (despite the unfortunate order issues) and v6[0] isn't quite so spread yet. Here's a list of other approaches out there worth looking at
- isntauuid[1] (mentioned in this thread, I've given it a name here)
- timeflake[2]
- HiLo[3][4]
- ulid[5]
-
Read the rest
ksuid[6] (made popular by segment.io)
- v1-v6 UUIDs (the ones we all know and some love)
- sequential interval based UUIDs in Postgres[7]
Just add a UUID -- this almost surely isn't going to be what bricks your architecture unless you have some crazy high write use case like time series or IoT or something maybe.
[0]: http://gh.peabody.io/uuidv6/
[1]: https://instagram-engineering.com/sharding-ids-at-instagram-...
[2]: https://github.com/anthonynsimon/timeflake
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hi/Lo_algorithm
[4]: https://www.npgsql.org/efcore/modeling/generated-properties....
[5]: https://github.com/edoceo/pg-ulid
[6]: https://github.com/segmentio/ksuid
[7]: https://www.2ndquadrant.com/en/blog/sequential-uuid-generato...