Change sort order on UUIDs?

I've been testing the new UUID functionality in 8.3dev and noticed that
UUIDs are sorted using memcmp in their default in-memory layout, which
is:

struct uuid {

uint32_t time_low;

uint16_t time_mid;

uint16_t time_hi_and_version;

uint8_t clock_seq_hi_and_reserved;

uint8_t clock_seq_low;

uint8_t node[_UUID_NODE_LEN];

};

When done that way, you're going to see a lot of index B-tree
fragmentation with even DCE 1.1 (ISO/IEC 11578:1996) time based UUIDs,
as described above. With random (version 4) or hashed based (version 3
or 5) UUIDs there's nothing that can be done to improve the situation,
obviously.

So I went down the path of changing the pgsql sorting order to instead
sort by, from most significant to least:

1) Node (MAC address),

2) clock sequence, then

3) time.

The implementation is as follows:

/* internal uuid compare function */

static int

uuid_internal_cmp(const pg_uuid_t *arg1, const pg_uuid_t *arg2)

{

int result;

/* node */

if ((result = memcmp(&arg1->data[10], &arg2->data[10], 6)) != 0)

return result;

/* clock_seq_hi_and_reserved, clock_seq_low */

if ((result = memcmp(&arg1->data[8], &arg2->data[8], 2)) != 0)

return result;

/* time_hi_and_version */

if ((result = memcmp(&arg1->data[6], &arg2->data[6], 2)) != 0)

return result;

/* time_mid */

if ((result = memcmp(&arg1->data[4], &arg2->data[4], 2)) != 0)

return result;

/* time_low */

return memcmp(&arg1->data[0], &arg2->data[0], 4);

}

This results in much less fragmentation and reduced page hits when
indexing a UUID column. When multiple UUID generators with different
node values contribute to a single table concurrently, it should also
result in better performance than if they sorted the way they do now or
by time first.

Sorting UUIDs when they are random/hashed with memcmp seems pretty darn
useless in all scenarios and performs poorly on indexes. This method is
equally poor with random/hashed UUIDs, but much better with version 1
time based UUIDs.

What do you guys think about changing the default behavior of pgsql to
compare UUIDs this way?

-- Robert