Re: using UID in DB

On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 12:37 AM, Lester Caine <lester@lsces.co.uk> wrote: > 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 Thanks for the info. I'll look into it. > 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. Don't you mean raw number as 16 byte, which is what I intend to use binary(16) on MySQL if I'm going to use MySQL as DB, rather than 32/36 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. > Agreed. Displaying that character string is ugly :)