Re: [PATCH] Implement uuid_version()

On Sun, Apr 7, 2019 at 10:15 AM David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> wrote:
> I see some.
>
> UUIDs turn out to be super useful in distributed systems to give good
> guarantees of uniqueness without coordinating with a particular node.
> Such systems have become a good bit more common since the most recent
> time this was discussed.

That's not really a compelling reason, though, because anybody who
needs UUIDs can always install the extension. And on the other hand,
if we moved UUID support into core, then we'd be adding a hard compile
dependency on one of the UUID facilities, which might annoy some
developers. We could possibly work around that by implementing our
own UUID facilities in core, but I'm not volunteering to do the work,
and I'm not sure that the work has enough benefit to justify the
labor.

My biggest gripe about uuid-ossp is that the name is stupid. I wish
we could see our way clear to renaming that extension to just 'uuid',
because as J.L. says, virtually nobody's actually compiling against
the OSSP library any more. The trick there is how to do that without
annoying exiting users. Maybe we could leave behind an "upgrade"
script for the uuid-ossp extension that does CREATE EXTENSION uuid,
then alters all objects owned by the current extension to be owned by
the new extension, and maybe even drops itself.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
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