From the "Introduction" section of the linked document: "The motivation for using UUIDs as database keys stems primarily from the fact that applications are in

From the "Introduction" section of the linked document: "The motivation for using UUIDs as database keys stems primarily from the fact that applications are increasingly distributed in nature. Simplistic "auto increment" schemes with integers in sequence do not work well in a distributed system since the effort required to synchronize such numbers across a network can easily become a burden. The fact that UUIDs can be used to create unique and reasonably short values in distributed systems without requiring synchronization makes them a good candidate for use as a database key in such environments. "