nanoid VS ksuid

nanoid – A library for generating short, unique IDs (like NxWDZ-j95C).

The demo application we’re going to build in the following sections is a to-do app with a REST API backend that allows multiple users to log in. It also allows those users to create, check, and delete their to-dos. Apart from the Node.js runtime, this project will use Express.js for the server, bcrypt to hash passwords, and nanoid to generate random IDs.

CURRENT_CLIENT_ID is the random unique string Id generated by nanoid that gets generated whenever the client is opened on the brower’s tab.

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?

OP here - we avoid sequences in all but one part of our application due to a dependency. We use [KSUIDs][1] and UUID v4 in various places. This one "gotcha" applies to any sequence, so it's worth calling out as general advice when running a migration like this.

[1]: https://segment.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-the-uuid/

UUID v4 isn't large enough to prevent collisions, that is why segment.io created https://github.com/segmentio/ksuid which is 160bit vs the 128bit of a UUIDv4.

Assuming you don't need to use UUIDv7 (or any UUID's) then https://github.com/segmentio/ksuid provides a much bigger keyspace. You could just append a string prefix if you wanted to namespace, but the chance of collisions of a KSUID is many times smaller than a UUID of any version.

KSUID's are have temporal-lexicographical order plus 128 bits of entropy, which is more than UUIDv4.

https://github.com/segmentio/ksuid

That's why you use ksuid (https://segment.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-the-uuid/) or, if you're willing to go with a draft spec you could go with the new UUID formats https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-uuidrev-rfc4122bi...

Interesting in more history of UUIDs? Twilio Segment's blog has an amazing history lesson about how they came to be.