cuid2 VS pg_idkit

The CUID readme [1] explains that there's no real point to K-sortable on modern hardware:

[1] https://github.com/paralleldrive/cuid2?tab=readme-ov-file#no...

There's a comparison in the README of the project:

https://github.com/paralleldrive/cuid2#the-contenders

Some of the arguments mentioned are explained elsewhere in the README, others are assumed.

One argument standing out for me is the lack of collision-resistance for UUIDv4 which is surprising for me and I didn't spot any sources for that argument.

Another argument is the entropy source where they go about that Math.random is not reliable as a single entropy source but glimpsing at the source code, they sprinkle the CUID with Math.random data.

I am no expert in ID security, so I am not qualified to speak about the validity of their arguments, only that there's insufficient information to validate without prior knowledge about the problem domain.

I'm recently finding cuid2 to be the best of these alternative GUIDs. They seem to have all of the benefits for what you would want to use a GUID for, but none of the drawbacks of existing implementations.[1]

[1]: https://github.com/paralleldrive/cuid2#the-contenders

I've just released v2.0.0 of my cuid2 python port. The original cuid2 package comes from JS world by ParallelDrive. They have a lot of the reasons to use Cuid2 posted in their repo, including

I recently wrote a Go implementation of CUID2 because I could not find an existing one. It is not hello-world, but it is not duff's device either, which by the way neither could explain what it did from just the raw code in isolation.

I think this implementation is the original one. It has the following to say about why it exists. And what it is good for:

There's also https://github.com/paralleldrive/cuid2 which likely should be added to this as it is likely one of the better ones out there now.

If you're using prisma then you can use CUID or CUID2 to manually generate it.

Unfortunately, as of PostgreSQL 16, UUIDv7 are not yet supported out of the box. For the time being, use an extension such as pg_uuidv7 or pg_idkit to generate UUIDv7 e.g. as default primary key when you CREATE new records.

If you like this (I do very much), you might also like pg_idkit[0] which is a little extension with a bunch of other kinds of IDs that you can generate inside PG, thanks to the seriously awesome pgrx[1] and Rust.

[0]: https://github.com/VADOSWARE/pg_idkit

[1]: https://github.com/pgcentralfoundation/pgrx

Yup this is one of the reasons I put together a light extension for this:

https://github.com/VADOSWARE/pg_idkit

There are a lot of options for UUID extensions (lots of great pure SQL ones!), but I wanted to get as many ID generation strategies in one place

Also note that native UUID v7 is slated to land in pg17:

https://commitfest.postgresql.org/44/4388/

https://github.com/ulid/spec/issues

I went through this exploration a while back for a new project and decided on uuidv7s, which are binary compatible with ULIDs but will likely find more support as they get added to the original UUID RFC.

Either UUIDv7 or XIDs seem like better choices than ULIDs for new projects.

* Supabase on different primary key considerations: https://supabase.com/blog/choosing-a-postgres-primary-key

* Postgres extension for generating various kinds of IDs: https://github.com/VADOSWARE/pg_idkit

I also made an issue in the repo so eventually I should get to expanding the benchmark set as well.