Re: Using GUIDs

By its definition, GUID ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID ) is not
guaranteed to be unique. As a result, it could cause problems in tables
that have a large number of rows - actually this could result in hard to
reproduce, seemingly random errors in your systems that use the database.
How does a GUID help you over a BIGSERIAL?

Unless you are generating the PK in multiple databases, a BIGSERIAL should
act as a UUID.

Maybe if you provide a little more detail on why you want to use GUID or
UUID fields we can help you come up with more options.

Thanks,
Aaron

On 6/26/06, Dennis Wagner <wagner(at)spheron(dot)com> wrote:
>
> Hi list!
>
> I'm currently thinking about using GUIDs as primary keys. To be more
> precise: On *some* of the tables in my structure I *will* need GUIDs (or
> UUIDs or whatever format may proove usefull). Now, this implies that
> using a bigserial-field for readability and the uids is redundand, so
> I'm thinking of dropping my current primary-key-columns in favor of an
> uuid-column.
> In the postgres-docs I can't find any built-in data-types directly
> supporting guids. I found the project pguuid on gborg but it somehow
> lacks documentation and doesn't seem very promising (since it doesn't
> seem to be touched since three years ago...).
> I have found some older discussion on the archives but in the end noone
> ever came up with THE solution nor did anyone talk about the
> performance-impact using a guid-row as primary key would have over
> using, let's say bigint.
> Has anyone made some test in this field and can share some experiences?
> Would this question be better placed in the hackers list?
>
> Best regards
>
>
>
> Dennis
>
>