Re: using UID in DB

Tommy Pham wrote:

Hi, I'm just wondering if anyone on this list using some type of UID/UUID/GUID in any of the DB? If so, what DBMS/RDBMS are you using and how many rows do you have for the table(s) using it? What data type are you using for that column?

Firebird is currently improving support for universal identifier, but it has been a 'feature' for a long time. It becomes essential when one is running multiple databases across multiple machines that need to be combined later, so the 'id' is unique to the machine it was generated on. Storage wise it is just a 128 bit number, so twice as big as a simple 64 bit 'generator' that would normally be used in a single database system. The improvement is to use a raw number rather than a 16 character string. Generating it can follow one of the standards ( I forget the number ;) ) Displaying the number in one of the 'preferred formats' is just a matter for the client app, but one would probably never need to display it normally. -- Lester Caine - G8HFL ----------------------------- Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/ Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk// Firebird - http://www.firebirdsql.org/index.php