> We've recently seen this problem when a database for the first time for a non-numeric system in its ids and downstream systems that converted that to an integ

> We've recently seen this problem when a database for the first time for a non-numeric system in its ids and downstream systems that converted that to an integer started to fail. I can add another anecdote to that list. In my case it was some code in a consuming system that expected u16 sized int which broke when the producing system increased to 32 bit sized int. I mean, no code change just the auto increment on the database finally exhausted 16 bits. Tangentially, this is why my first thought when designing a new system is to use uuid/guid stored as a string in hyphenated hexadecimal. It prevents any downstream consumer from even attempting to store it as an int. I'm now wary of things that look like int but aren't actually integers since people will often mistakenly treat them as such.