5 ms·
The article would have benefited from explaining in what situations you might prefer this to a UUID
by emmab 12y ago
The article would have benefited from explaining in what situations you might prefer this to a UUID
- pstrateman 12y agoThe only reason to use this over a UUID is if you want the primary key to be implicitly chronologically ordered. The ordering guarantee is weak though, it's provided by clients all potentially with their own concept of time.
- rosser 12y agoYeah, you absolutely can't trust client-generated timestamps. We have a table tracking metadata on customer-uploaded photos (dimensions, file size, color profile, &c), including the camera's timestamp. According to their cameras, our customers have uploaded pics taken before the Buddha sat beneath the Bodhi tree, and after the Khitomer Accord was signed. Fortunately, we also store an upload timestamp, and our servers all sync to local NTP.