Hashids.java VS nanoid

You basically want Hashids but sequential? Why not simple convert a base 10 (0-9) number to hex? (0-F)

I found hashids [1] to be a great compromise between integer ids in the database and copyable non-enumerable strings on the client.

[1] https://hashids.org/

I wonder how this might compare to just storing regular autoincrementing ints in the database, and converting to/from hashids (https://hashids.org/) at the edge. It eliminates the collision concern and stores more compactly at the cost of a tiny amount of encode/decode when processing requests. You’d want to push it down as close to the database layer as possible to avoid inadvertent int ID leaks; I added native hashids support to clickhouse but I’m not sure what other database support might entail.

Since hashids are not really hashes and are not secure at all this is not even achieved. Hashids can be easily decoded without the salt by a simple brute-force attack described by the authors of hashid themselves right on their website: https://hashids.org/

You don't necessarily need to use UUIDs. You could use something like Hashids to generate random strings from your sequential IDs in a reversible way, so that users can't predict what their values will be, but you can decode them as needed.

You should not use UUIDv4 as a primary key. You can use normal int values and then use hashids to make them safe for URL. UUIDv7 might be good to use as well once they are more widely supported as well.

Last thing left is to use our new upload function in our server action. Since I like to upload images in single format and have some more control over them, I will additionally use sharp library. For file name, I'll generate some random string using nanoid:

Our API is in node. And God, how I suffered to import nanoid in an esmodule project. I had to vendor it, since using a previous version was not ideal. With bun, we can no longer worry about that. Just import what you need and done.

No thread about UUID is complete without a plug for NanoID! https://github.com/ai/nanoid/blob/main/README.md

Generate a unique file name using the nanoid library.

The syntax should read similar to SQL itself. We’re using a Python port of nanoid to generate our IDs. There’s only one thing missing… how do we actually create the table?

I usually go for Nano Id for new projects https://github.com/ai/nanoid

Nano ID

In another comment I mentioned I use nanoid in my projects now. It has a default space of 64^21 and has an a page where you can play with key lengths and alphabet sizes and see the probability of collisions :

https://zelark.github.io/nano-id-cc/

At the default 64 character alphabet with a 21 character key length it would take ~41 million years in order to have a 1% probability of at least one collision if you generated 1000 ids per second.

Using randomly generated IDs like Nano ID could be a good alternative, however, as a developer, we must understand what Nano ID really does in our application. Defining the number of characters in the generated IDs is also important, to help with that Nano ID has a Collision Calculator to give us how many years in order to have a 1% probability of collision.