nanoid VS dynaglue

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.

IDs used here for buttons and tasks must be unique to work correctly. This is ensured by using the nanoid package, which automatically generates unique ids.

This got me thinking about DynamoDB (a database I use day to day, and for which I maintain dynaglue, a single-table mapping layer for TypeScript/JavaScript), and made me wonder if a DynamoDB adapter existed. I stumbled across this GitHub issue, and arrogantly shot off this tweet not expecting any replies.

As a result, I developed dynaglue for this purpose, and highly recommend the use of something like it when developing with DynamoDB (alternatives I've seen include DynamoDB Toolbox, TypeORM and DynamoDB OneTable).