If you are fine with creating IDs in a centralized way (as you would do in 99% of cases anyways) you can just use a normal incrementing integer primary key. The

If you are fine with creating IDs in a centralized way (as you would do in 99% of cases anyways) you can just use a normal incrementing integer primary key. Then encrypt it with XTEA (either at your API boundary or in the database) to get non-sequential unguessable 64 bit keys. [1] has example code for postgres. If the original key don't have duplicates then the XTEA encrypted keys don't have duplicates either. Then just encode it in a format of your choosing. Youtube uses a modified base64 encoding (no padding, and + and / are replaced by - and _). And youtube video ids seem to also be 64 bits, just like xtea output. 1: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/XTEA_(crypt_64_bits) https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/XTEA_(crypt_64_bits)