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spec
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Bye Sequence, Hello UUIDv7
UUIDv7 is a nice idea, and should probably be what people use by default instead of UUIDv4.
For the curious:
* UUIDv4 are 128 bits long, 122 bits of which are random, with 6 bits used for the version. Traditionally displayed as 32 hex characters with 4 dashes, so 36 alphanumeric characters, and compatible with anything that expects a UUID.
* UUIDv7 are 128 bits long, 48 bits encode a unix timestamp with millisecond precision, 6 bits are for the version, and 74 bits are random. You're expected to display them the same as other UUIDs, and should be compatible with basically anything that expects a UUID. (Would be a very odd system that parses a UUID and throws an error because it doesn't recognise v7, but I guess it could happen, in theory?)
* ULIDs (https://github.com/ulid/spec) are 128 bits long, 48 bits encode a unix timestamp with millisecond precision, 80 bits are random. You're expected to display them in Crockford's base32, so 26 alphanumeric characters. Compatible with almost everything that expects a UUID (since they're the right length). Spec has some dumb quirks if followed literally but thankfully they mostly don't hurt things.
* KSUIDs (https://github.com/segmentio/ksuid) are 160 bits long, 32 bits encode a timestamp with second precision and a custom epoch of May 13th, 2014, and 128 bits are random. You're expected to display them in base62, so 27 alphanumeric characters. Since they're a different length, they're not compatible with UUIDs.
I quite like KSUIDs; I think base62 is a smart choice. And while the timestamp portion is a trickier question, KSUIDs use 32 bits which, with second precision (more than good enough), means they won't overflow for well over a century. Whereas UUIDv7s use 48 bits, so even with millisecond precision (not needed) they won't overflow for something like 8000 years. We can argue whether 100 years us future proof enough (I'd argue it probably is), but 8000 years is just silly. Nobody will ever generate a compliant UUIDv7 with any of the first several bits aren't 0. The only downside to KSUIDs is the length isn't UUID compatible (and arguably, that they don't devote 6 bits to a compliant UUID version).
Still feels like there's room for improvement, but for now I think I'd always pick UUIDv7 over UUIDv4 unless there's an very specific reason not to.
- FLaNK Stack Weekly for 12 September 2023
- You Don't Need UUID
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Type-safe, K-sortable, globally unique identifier inspired by Stripe IDs
Many people had the same idea. For example ULID https://github.com/ulid/spec is more compact and stores the time so it is lexically ordered.
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Analyzing New Unique Identifier Formats (UUIDv6, UUIDv7, and UUIDv8) (2022)
ULIDs, https://github.com/ulid/spec, are also already in widespread use and are essentially the same idea as v7 UUIDs.
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Generate unique Id
You may also want to look at ULIDs
- Launch HN: Activepieces (YC S22) – Open-Source Zapier Alternative
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Choosing a Postgres Primary Key
I use ULID, 128 bits, time and great sorting
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Trade-offs from using ULIDs at incident.io
The ULID spec with many implementations: https://github.com/ulid/spec
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We Chose NanoIDs for PlanetScale’s API
ULID hits most of these, and can be converted to UUID for use with databases supporting this datatype (not a strong column): https://github.com/ulid/spec
prototypes
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New UUID Formats from IETF
I made a simple Python test library that extends the standard UUID class with UUIDv6 and UUIDv7. You might want to check it out. https://github.com/oittaa/uuid6-python
The official UUID Draft repository has also some alternatives if you'd like to check those out. https://github.com/uuid6/prototypes
Postgres supports UUIDs with any version number natively so you can then do something like this with it:
create table data (id uuid, firstname varchar(100));
Nice to see another implementation which takes a bit different approach. Just for your information, there's now Draft 03 which changes the format a little bit. I kinda liked the arbitrary precision of Draft 02, but the newer one just requires millisecond precision and then basically leaves it up to the implementation how to handle the generation of multiple UUIDs within the same millisecond.
What are some alternatives?
dynamodb-onetable - DynamoDB access and management for one table designs with NodeJS
uuid6-ietf-draft - Next Generation UUID Formats
kuuid - K-sortable UUID - roughly time-sortable unique id generator
python-ksuid - A pure-Python KSUID implementation
ulid-lite - Generate unique, yet sortable identifiers
shortuuid.rb - Convert UUIDs & numbers into space efficient and URL-safe Base62 strings, or any other alphabet.
ulid - Universally Unique Lexicographically Sortable Identifier (ULID) in Python 3
ksuid - Java implementation of K-Sortable Globally Unique IDs
cuid - Collision-resistant ids optimized for horizontal scaling and performance.
nanoid - A tiny (124 bytes), secure, URL-friendly, unique string ID generator for JavaScript
uulid.go - ULID-UUID compatibility library for generating and parsing ULIDs.
timeflake - Timeflake is a 128-bit, roughly-ordered, URL-safe UUID.