3 ms·
Still surprised people use incrementing ints for ids over uuids for web apis that may become immense. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4122.txt http://www.ietf.org/r
by drawkbox 16y ago
Still surprised people use incrementing ints for ids over uuids for web apis that may become immense.
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4122.txt http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4122.txt
uuids are made just for this purpose, string based, never bigger than 40 characters (with dashes and curly braces).
Most products use uuids or Microsoft's name for them guids.
- jonhohle 16y agoI prefer my ID's universally unique. I worry that globally unique ID's won't scale as we begin to colonize other planets. (yes, its a joke.)
- tjpick 16y agoStating it is a joke kind of ruined the joke.
- ryansking 16y agowe don't use incrementing ids, but needed ids that increase over time (so that you can sort tweets by them). hence, snowflake: http://github.com/twitter/snowflake http://github.com/twitter/snowflake
- mayanklahiri 16y agoYou don't even need to go that far. For non-critical applications (i.e., your web app), you can randomly generate a small string, say 12 bytes, using base-62 characters (A-Za-z0-9) to serve as a probably unique user ID (with VERY high probability).
- wahnfrieden 16y agoHeard of GUIDs? Make part of it a timestamp, and the chance of collisions goes down astronomically further.
- mayanklahiri 16y agoIn some cases, including a timestamp in an ID can be giving away information considered private. Sure, you could just hash the resultant ID, but then you're getting back to random digits anyway.