Re: UUID column as pimrary key?

On Jan 5, 2011, at 8:05 AM, Bill Moran wrote:

> Beyond that, the namespace size for a UUID is so incomprehensibly huge
> that the chance of two randomly generated UUIDs having the same value
> is incomprehensibly unlikely

Yes, as in: it is *far* more likely that all of your team members and all of your client contacts will be simultaneously struck by lightning and killed in their sleep, and it is *far* more likely that all life on earth will be wiped out by an asteroid impact, and it is *far* more likely that the solar system orbits are not actually stable and earth will fly off into space... If you're worried about UUID collisions, then either your priorities are completely wrong, or you live in a bomb shelter--that's not sarcasm by the way, it's simply true, the chance of a collision is so vanishingly small that it is dwarfed by all sorts of risks that we all ignore because the chances are so low, including the chance that all drives in all your RAIDs across all your replicas will simultaneously fail on the same day that fires start in all the locations where your tapes are stored and all the sprinkler systems fail... (By "far" more likely, I mean many many many orders of magnitude...)

> In the end, we chose b for the human
> factor.

A very good decision, in the case where you're actually able to control each independent system.

> Face it, reading, remembering, and typing UUIDs kinda sucks.

Lots of copy & paste, or custom GUI tools for devs & DBAs, or abuse like '...%', all of them painful in their own way.

--
Scott Ribe
scott_ribe(at)elevated-dev(dot)com
http://www.elevated-dev.com/
(303) 722-0567 voice