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You Don't Need UUID

henvic.dev

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Re: You Don't Need UUID

#91

Post by henvic »

Author here. I posted this because I've witnessed many systems in companies I've worked for where our end-users needed UUID to communicate with it (technical support, customer ID, etc.) in a way that makes communication harder. We could've used another shorter ID scheme, which would be fine.

The good thing about UUID is that it's omnipresent. From what I've heard, it's this lengthy (2^32) because it was hard to guarantee uniqueness when it was conceived in the telecom industry. The length is overkill, and per se, that's fine, but the fact that it dampers communication is awful.

That all said, since posting this, I've come to terms with accepting that it's part of life ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

P.S. Using a second human-friendly ID to end-users is an alternative adopted by some projects. However, most projects don't bother, and also, most good IDs you might want to share with people would make UUID unnecessary anyways (in practice).

Re: You Don't Need UUID

#92

Post by bandergirl »

insanitybit wrote: post #72
bandergirl wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

apple.com/iphone You can't beat that. Or would you rather receive texts that include the following? https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09V3HZ8B5/?pd_rd_w=DAycy&content-id=amzn1.sym.04e31e32-5e01-4048-8b59-a557891d595f:amzn1.sym.04e31e32-5e01-4048-8b59-a557891d595f&pf_rd_p=04e31e32-5e01-4048-8b59-a557891d595f&pf_rd_r=M1KXM468KNZJV189JBE7&pd_rd_wg=3O1uC&pd_rd_r=e51c1edc-213f-4c6d-b081-e23afa6bf4ab&ref_=vn_s_iwp&qid=1694453553…

Apple doesn't need to create pages for millions of arbitrary items for sale.

The point is that you can always always always do better than a 100-character URL.

Re: You Don't Need UUID

#93

Post by bandergirl »

5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #53
bandergirl wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

apple.com/iphone You can't beat that. Or would you rather receive texts that include the following? https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09V3HZ8B5/?pd_rd_w=DAycy&content-id=amzn1.sym.04e31e32-5e01-4048-8b59-a557891d595f:amzn1.sym.04e31e32-5e01-4048-8b59-a557891d595f&pf_rd_p=04e31e32-5e01-4048-8b59-a557891d595f&pf_rd_r=M1KXM468KNZJV189JBE7&pd_rd_wg=3O1uC&pd_rd_r=e51c1edc-213f-4c6d-b081-e23afa6bf4ab&ref_=vn_s_iwp&qid=1694453553…

You only really need this part: https://amazon.com/dp/B09V3HZ8B5

Yes but that's irrelevant, I used a real URL that you will receive in your texts. It's real life, it happens and it sucks. Let's not normalize it.

Re: You Don't Need UUID

#94

Post by dvlsg »

afgrant wrote: post #66
dgb23 wrote: post #16

An issue that is not solved by either UUIDv4 or the proposed solution (random base58 strings) is indexing performance. Both of those solutions typically make it hard for a DB if you write new entries, assuming you have an index on the ID. In addition it might be more calming to actually be sure that a particular ID is not in use without doing a round-trip. Is it practical to pre-allocate empty entries and reserve a s…

Are there modern databases that can’t readily index on a 128-bit value?

I don't think it's a matter of not being able to index on it, but that mostly random UUIDs (like v4) can lead to some interesting index fragmentation you have to stay on top of somehow.

Re: You Don't Need UUID

#95

Post by siva7 »

AdamH12113 wrote: post #78
iaaan wrote: post #3

The crux of this argument seems to be that UUIDs are too long? Which I disagree with. I can't memorize them, no, and it would be cumbersome to try to say one aloud, but these aren't situations I've ever found myself in. Does it make the URL in the URL bar longer? Yeah, but does that matter?

> Does it make the URL in the URL bar longer? Yeah, but does that matter? I appreciate shorter URLs any time I copy and paste them, which always involves looking at them and sometimes involves scrolling to the end to remove tracking- and search-related fluff. 128 bits is an absurd amount for a unique ID within a single system. Even 48 bits is very, very large -- enough to provide a unique ID (MAC address) to every Et…

That’s not the only major purpose for a UUID and even if it was, it still would be flat out wrong to claim that almost no application requires that.

Re: You Don't Need UUID

#96

Post by eagleinparadise »

erlendellingsen wrote: post #34

I usually go for Nano Id for new projects https://github.com/ai/nanoid

I generate uuidv7 as PK and have a publicId "slug" with a 13 character nanoId to display in the URL

not sure if this is duplicative but down the road i figure I can navigate whichever direction i need to go in

Re: You Don't Need UUID

#97

Post by [deleted] »

SoftTalker wrote: post #68
10000truths wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a better argument is that that the identifier needs to be unambiguous in cases where e.g. an ID needs to be communicated over the phone between an end user and a customer service rep. But that is easily solved with encodings like Base58 that exclude ambiguous characters.

Once you get over about 10 characters the chance that the user will skip or repeat a character or misread one goes up. Sometimes when I order parts for my car the site wants the VIN to verify that the parts are correct for that vehicle. I often have to make two or three attempts at entering it to get it right.

[deleted]

Re: You Don't Need UUID

#98

Post by stock_toaster »

kiitos wrote: post #33

A UUID is 128 bits, or 16 bytes. This code suggests IDs which are 11 bytes. That's not really comparable. A UUID can also be encoded in any form, it doesn't need to be represented as the dashed string notation which is common, you can just as easily use the base58 alphabet suggested in the post. But the code in the post doesn't encode to base58 correctly. You need to map 58 bits of the input, sequentially, to one cha…

pedantry: uuidv4 is only 122 bits of randomness.

  > 6 predetermined variant and version bits, leaving 122 bits for the randomly generated part
  > --wikipedia

Re: You Don't Need UUID

#99

Post by afgrant »

jholman wrote: post #69
monero-xmr wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lack of humbleness and respect for devs who have came before you and solved all these problems is coming through strong. But I myself was that way 15 years ago. It takes a lot of hard lessons to realize everything new is old and we truly stand on the shoulders of 7000 giants all standing on each others’ shoulders.

That's how I feel about UUIDs themselves, and the people who advocate in favour of them. Interesting duality.

It’s just a 128-bit value that’s hexadecimal encoded. What can be controversial about that?

Re: You Don't Need UUID

#100

Post by tombert »

I don't know that I really agree with the logic here; certainly for some cases having a pretty URL matters (e.g. URL shorteners or even something like YouTube), but if your goal is to minimize URL size, and if you're centrally synchronizing anyway to avoid conflicts, why not just use integers or something? If you use a GMP-style bigint, I can virtually guarantee it'll be faster than any random string concat glue you come up with, and you're never going to run out of integers.

I like using GUID specifically because there's usually a built-in implementation everywhere, and because it's so stupidly huge, the likelihood of a conflict is statistically zero, meaning I don't need to bother synchronizing against a server.

Yes, it's technically possible I could save a few bytes of bandwidth or something by using some kind of base encoding, and maybe in some kind of embedded case that might matter, but for a vast majority of cases, GUID is absolutely fine, and since it's used everywhere, it's also very thoroughly tested by multi-billion-dollar corporations meaning that I don't have to worry much about any issues.

So no, you don't need GUID, you don't need a lot of stuff in the software world. I could poll bytes from /dev/urandom and probably get something that works well enough, I could turn off garbage collection and just pre-allocate all my memory before hand, I could avoid an OS entirely and write straight to the metal, I could do a lot of things, but I don't because I value my time . GUID solves a specific problem pretty well.

EDIT:

The reason I'm specifying this is because I think the title would be better if it was something like "You (probably) don't need UUID".

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