uuid6-ietf-draft VS uulid.go

https://github.com/uuid6/uuid6-ietf-draft/issues/27

Why not UUIDv7?

What if a new UUID version could be designed that would take the randomness of UUID4 and combine it with a timestamp prefix? This would make the UUID increase overall, but not locally – due to the random postfix. The random part ensures uniqueness when a high generation rate is necessary and also makes the UUIDs hard to predict – it’s not possible to guess the previous, or next UUID. It’s fairly simple to devise a custom UUID scheme, but fortunately, there is a new Internet-Draft (at the time of writing) defining new pseudo-sequential UUID versions that aim to solve exactly this issue: draft-peabody-dispatch-new-uuid-format-04. The current state and progress can be viewed at IETF Datatracker.

Brad Peabody did the original -00 draft, which was discussed as an FYI at an IEFT meeting in March 2020. See [1], around 50 lines from the bottom.

Kyzer Davis has since submitted two further revisions -01 and -02 in April and October 2021. See history in [2].

The current -02 draft is due to expire in April 2022. Presumably Kyzer Davis will try to get it discussed before then.

The GitHub repo tracking these drafts is https://github.com/uuid6/uuid6-ietf-draft/.

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/107/materials/minutes-1...

[2] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-peabody-dispatch-new-...

At the moment anyway, that XML link won't render per an XML parsing error. For anyone who wants a quick look at what these XML docs look like here's one for UUID6 [0].

[0] https://github.com/uuid6/uuid6-ietf-draft/blob/master/draft-...

For those interested in time based UUIDs, I've written libraries in Ruby and Go to move quickly between them:

https://github.com/sudhirj/uulid.go

There’s a spec called ULID that’s pretty much this with default base32 encoding

https://github.com/ulid/spec

I’ve also worked on a UUID-ULID bridge for Go

https://github.com/sudhirj/uulid.go

And seeing as this is just 128 bits it’s quite easy to move seamlessly between formats and representations.

I’ve found this concept especially useful in nosql stores like DynamoDB, where using a ULID primary key makes objects time sortable automatically. It’s also quite easy to query for items by zeroing out the random component and setting only the time stamp bytes.