5 ms·

Second precision is too coarse for many (most?) use cases.

by kiitos 3y ago

travisjungroth 3y ago
How so? It seems like the only real use case for these timestamps is to get data from around the same time together. A second is fine for that. It's not about concurrency or avoiding collisions. A second can't handle that, but neither can a millisecond.
- kiitos 3y ago
  > It seems like the only real use case for these timestamps is to get data from around the same time together. Yep. > A second is fine for that. Not when you're doing O(1k-1M) operations per second, it isn't!
  - travisjungroth 3y ago
    I’d think that the locality would only matter at the scale of your query. I’m sure someone has queries with a window less than a second and so much traffic, but it seems niche enough to not optimize the standard for it. I could definitely be off. I work at a company that gets those levels of traffic but don’t deal with it directly.
    - kiitos 3y ago
      For me the whole value prop for ULIDs is that they can be generated by any node in a distributed system without coordination, while roughly preserving time order. "Roughly" meaning: all IDs will be globally ordered at millisecond precision, subject to the accuracy of each node's system clock; and IDs from a specific node will be locally ordered, subject to the details of the monotonicity part of the ID generator. This is important for me, because most of the things I attach IDs to will happen many many many times per second.
contravariant 3y ago
If you need more than second precision then millisecond doesn't get you much further. The fact that the epoch ends in 120 years is a bit more worrying, but is also just about non-critical enough that it will be ignored for at least the next century. Also, to all future historians of 2150, sorry about the mess, but yes we knew this was going to happen. Whatever it was.
- kiitos 3y ago
  > If you need more than second precision then millisecond doesn't get you much further. It gets you precisely 100x further.
  - HALtheWise 3y ago
    *1000x
    - kiitos 3y ago
      Oops, yes, this one.

Second precision is too coarse for many (most?) use cases.

by kiitos 3y ago

Second precision is too coarse for many (most?) use cases.

How so? It seems like the only real use case for these timestamps is to get data from around the same time together. A second is fine for that. It's not about concurrency or avoiding collisions. A second can't handle that, but neither can a millisecond.

kiitos 3y ago
> It seems like the only real use case for these timestamps is to get data from around the same time together. Yep. > A second is fine for that. Not when you're doing O(1k-1M) operations per second, it isn't!
- travisjungroth 3y ago
  I’d think that the locality would only matter at the scale of your query. I’m sure someone has queries with a window less than a second and so much traffic, but it seems niche enough to not optimize the standard for it. I could definitely be off. I work at a company that gets those levels of traffic but don’t deal with it directly.
  - kiitos 3y ago
    For me the whole value prop for ULIDs is that they can be generated by any node in a distributed system without coordination, while roughly preserving time order. "Roughly" meaning: all IDs will be globally ordered at millisecond precision, subject to the accuracy of each node's system clock; and IDs from a specific node will be locally ordered, subject to the details of the monotonicity part of the ID generator. This is important for me, because most of the things I attach IDs to will happen many many many times per second.

contravariant 3y ago

If you need more than second precision then millisecond doesn't get you much further. The fact that the epoch ends in 120 years is a bit more worrying, but is also just about non-critical enough that it will be ignored for at least the next century. Also, to all future historians of 2150, sorry about the mess, but yes we knew this was going to happen. Whatever it was.

kiitos 3y ago
> If you need more than second precision then millisecond doesn't get you much further. It gets you precisely 100x further.
- HALtheWise 3y ago
  *1000x
  - kiitos 3y ago
    Oops, yes, this one.