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Blog post: UPID is as UPID does https://rdrn.me/upid/ https://rdrn.me/upid/ --- BTW: Hi/Lo scheme for Primary Keys / IDs was invented long before Stripe exi

Blog post: UPID is as UPID does https://rdrn.me/upid/ https://rdrn.me/upid/ --- BTW: Hi/Lo scheme for Primary Keys / IDs was invented long before Stripe existed. Partcularly, I used short up to 3 letters prefixes to make IDs Human-readable (and writable!) more than 20 years ago. 5 years later Amazon started using similar scheme in their AWS product, i.e i-NNNNN for instances, etc.[1]. In theory there are 2 kinds of ID schemes: technical/surrogate and natural/business/semantic (i.e. those derived from the natural properties of the object the ID refers to). Adding a prefix with the type, makes ID scheme hybrid. "Hi" part (prefix) is natural, and "Lo" part is technical. In case of UPID/ULID/UUIDv7 even the "Lo" part is hybrid, since it includes an information when the entity was created (or at least inserted into the database/system). --- [1] List of some AWS ID prefixes: i- vol- snap- ami- eni- sg- vpc- subnet- acl- rtb- igw- dopt- vpn- vgw- cgw- nat- rds- lb-

carderne 2y ago
Thanks for this, hadn’t thought of this in terms of Hi/Lo. The similarity is limited though because there isn’t any sequence of Hi values…? AWS also a great example! But I wonder if they’re storing them as fixed 128bit and getting the juicy performance benefits.
- nivertech 2y ago
  Just because the "Hi" part is categorical rather than numeric and has a low cardinality doesn't make it any less of a Hi/Lo scheme. This is my own classification, but I think I've read at least one blog where the author called similar prefixes a Hi/Lo scheme The prefixes are primarily used to create human-readable IDs, which will help avoid human errors and make debugging easier for developers The original purpose of the Hi/Lo algorithm[1] was mainly to allow the client side to generate PKs in batches (as a performance optimization, offline operation, or building entire data structures on the client side), all of which can be replaced today by UUIDs/ULIDs and the like --- [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/282099/whats-the-hi-lo-algorithm https://stackoverflow.com/questions/282099/whats-the-hi-lo-a...

carderne 2y ago

Thanks for this, hadn’t thought of this in terms of Hi/Lo. The similarity is limited though because there isn’t any sequence of Hi values…? AWS also a great example! But I wonder if they’re storing them as fixed 128bit and getting the juicy performance benefits.

nivertech 2y ago
Just because the "Hi" part is categorical rather than numeric and has a low cardinality doesn't make it any less of a Hi/Lo scheme. This is my own classification, but I think I've read at least one blog where the author called similar prefixes a Hi/Lo scheme The prefixes are primarily used to create human-readable IDs, which will help avoid human errors and make debugging easier for developers The original purpose of the Hi/Lo algorithm[1] was mainly to allow the client side to generate PKs in batches (as a performance optimization, offline operation, or building entire data structures on the client side), all of which can be replaced today by UUIDs/ULIDs and the like --- [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/282099/whats-the-hi-lo-algorithm https://stackoverflow.com/questions/282099/whats-the-hi-lo-a...