11–20 of 65 posts
A couple of notable Java libs:
https://github.com/f4b6a3/ulid-creator
I think the issue with a lib like this is that people might use it, thinking they don't need the IDs to be secure... until they need to be. But by then plenty would have been generated, and a lot of code would rely on this sortable property. In fact, I don't see the point of a library like this, it's trying to encode two pieces of information into one string. Why is that? Why not encode geolocation or IP while they'r…
Obviously, if you rely on the IDs to be unguessable/brute-forceable as part of your access control, then it is certainly bad to use such IDs. But I have not yet seen a case where I need both sortable and secure IDs. Being collision-free is what we want in a database context, and if it can hold some more information for the order, all the better.
w3c distributed id spec/primer
I think the issue with a lib like this is that people might use it, thinking they don't need the IDs to be secure... until they need to be. But by then plenty would have been generated, and a lot of code would rely on this sortable property. In fact, I don't see the point of a library like this, it's trying to encode two pieces of information into one string. Why is that? Why not encode geolocation or IP while they'r…
With a database like postgres with full page writes enabled, it can blow out quite quickly at scale.
I think the issue with a lib like this is that people might use it, thinking they don't need the IDs to be secure... until they need to be. But by then plenty would have been generated, and a lot of code would rely on this sortable property. In fact, I don't see the point of a library like this, it's trying to encode two pieces of information into one string. Why is that? Why not encode geolocation or IP while they'r…
Sortable IDs have pleasant properties on insertion in traditional btree indexes as all the new values are on one edge of the tree. Truly random IDs end up with random I/O on the index tree. With a database like postgres with full page writes enabled, it can blow out quite quickly at scale.
I think the issue with a lib like this is that people might use it, thinking they don't need the IDs to be secure... until they need to be. But by then plenty would have been generated, and a lot of code would rely on this sortable property. In fact, I don't see the point of a library like this, it's trying to encode two pieces of information into one string. Why is that? Why not encode geolocation or IP while they'r…
>Why not encode geolocation or IP while they're at it.
Version 1 (and 2) of UUIDs encoded the MAC-Address + ns timestamp. So there you go.
Version 3 and 5 just hash a namespace string and a name string with md5 and sha1 respectively (same inputs generate same output)
Version 4, which these days is used by almost everything, just uses whatever pseudo-random numbers the implementation chose to use. If you can figure out what PRNG (pseudo-random number generator) was used (if any) and the internal state of that PRNG, then you may be able to guess/forge UUIDs. The spec does not mandate using a cryptographically-secure PRNG, although a lot of implementations out there today will probably use one.
Anyway, thinking UUIDs would be secure is wishful thinking, unless you did the legwork to make sure you control the generator, and the generator you use is using Version 4 with a cryptographically-secure PRNG, and you can guarantee that that will not change in the future; then you get 122 bits of secure random numbers (+ 6 static bits for version and variant).
By comparison, this implementation of "fuuids" gives you 96 bits of secure-enough random numbers or 64 bits in the nanosecond case (it uses os.urandom(12) and os.urandom(8), compared to os.urandom(16) that the standard lib in python uses)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sortable IDs have pleasant properties on insertion in traditional btree indexes as all the new values are on one edge of the tree. Truly random IDs end up with random I/O on the index tree. With a database like postgres with full page writes enabled, it can blow out quite quickly at scale.
It’s worse with clustered indexes — all of the data experiences this issue, not just the index.
Additionally re-reading things closely I believe this package wouldn't benefit databases at all since the "sortable" form appears to be the common string representation while postgres will internally store UUIDs (at least in a UUID column) as their binary values - leading to indexing still being out of order unless you specify a ::TEXT casting.
I think the issue with a lib like this is that people might use it, thinking they don't need the IDs to be secure... until they need to be. But by then plenty would have been generated, and a lot of code would rely on this sortable property. In fact, I don't see the point of a library like this, it's trying to encode two pieces of information into one string. Why is that? Why not encode geolocation or IP while they'r…
Secure? These fuuids are supposed to replace regular uuids, which aren't specified to be secure either. UUIDs are supposed to be quasi-unique (very low probability of collisions), not secure. They are, in my humble opinion, the wrong tool if you want secure. >Why not encode geolocation or IP while they're at it. Version 1 (and 2) of UUIDs encoded the MAC-Address + ns timestamp. So there you go. Version 3 and 5 just h…
With sortable IDs, you could potentially know when some item was generated, which may or may not be useful info, but why take the risk? I think it makes sense to minimise the data that the app or service exposes. With a regular uuid you can control whether you expose or not the creation time, while with sortable ids you can’t.