UUIDs are way over used. There is almost always a better key to use, usually a bigint for databases. If you're making some kind of leaderless distributed data store, then maybe, but even then there are other ID sharding strategies I'd go for first depending on the constraints.
For a single database, bigints are smaller and faster, with less footguns.
UUIDs can be nice for an opaque public ID, however I'd still prefer something like a Sqid for space and usability.
I am finding UUIDs help a lot if your primary schema consumer is an LLM.
Inappropriate aliasing of integer keys allows for silent errors in queries because it will actually return some result a lot of the time. A UUID is immune to this problem. The model recognizes its mistake a lot more reliably when previously non-empty tables start showing up empty after attempting a join.
Small nit: uuid7 is 128 bits (16 bytes) by definition. So there’s no need to convert it to binary. It already is. Unless you’re working with a stringified version of the uuid7.
UUIDs are way over used. There is almost always a better key to use, usually a bigint for databases. If you're making some kind of leaderless distributed data store, then maybe, but even then there are other ID sharding strategies I'd go for first depending on the constraints.
For a single database, bigints are smaller and faster, with less footguns.
UUIDs can be nice for an opaque public ID, however I'd still prefer something like a Sqid for space and usability.
> bigints are smaller and faster, with less footguns
But be careful!! Javascript WILL interpret your bigints as Number() and round them down because they are too big without telling you!!!
Famously seen by every snowflake user that has interacted with Javascript, quite an annoying problem.
Fortunately we're seeing more JS DB libraries offering to read large numbers as the BigInt type.
!!
Node.js drivers will correctly read int64 as string or bigint, not number.
E.g. pg for PostgreSQL
Maybe there’s a buggy driver but I don’t know it.
UUIDs also have a nice benefit of it being impossible to query the wrong table with one if you mixup what an FK goes to
Yeah this is nice - also helps with grepping dump files.
I am finding UUIDs help a lot if your primary schema consumer is an LLM.
Inappropriate aliasing of integer keys allows for silent errors in queries because it will actually return some result a lot of the time. A UUID is immune to this problem. The model recognizes its mistake a lot more reliably when previously non-empty tables start showing up empty after attempting a join.
No one ever got fired for using UUIDs
Oh gosh the ints v uuids debate for pks. This is worse than vim v eMacs or brackets v braces.
Isn't the solution just to use the rowid (after doing the read-id-after-insert dance)?
How much trouble does SQLite reysing rowid's actually cause?
Wait how is sqlite doing a million inserts a second?
':memory:'
https://sqlite.org/inmemorydb.html
sqlite is really fast. I'm surprised it's only a million.
In batches
Perils of “UUIDv4”. Everyone knows that’s what UUIDv7 was really for, and you should always convert that to binary to optimize everything.
Small nit: uuid7 is 128 bits (16 bytes) by definition. So there’s no need to convert it to binary. It already is. Unless you’re working with a stringified version of the uuid7.
Oh yes, I meant don’t store as an ID in its string format!
It's just s dumb as storing dates as strings, but people still do it.