haha, I see where I made my mistake. I imagined that I could break up a binary number 128 bits in length into 2 pieces of 64 bits each. But then I made the mistake of thinking I could represent each piece with a 64 bit character instead a character (or characters) that can represent 2^64 (whoops… very wrong). 64 = 2^7, so I would need at least 19 characters to represent 128 bits (because 128 / 7 = 18.29).
Thank you for checking me on this, and I appreciate the links to the alternate packages! Good to know there are so many options.
Yep. This is the RFC I’d like to see get adopted (an aside, your link to the RFC 404’s for me, I find it at: New UUID Formats). I’ve been watching it for a fair while now and my biggest concern is that it feels like it is moving through the standards process on geologic time scales (this is probably because of my ignorance of the standards process and my own impatience generally). Otherwise, it seems to have the right trade-offs, and speaks directly to more recent trends in using UUIDs with relational databases.
I have heard that ULID suffers some from it’s monotonic option definition, though this article seems to dispute that (https://zendesk.engineering/how-probable-are-collisions-with-ulids-monotonic-option-d604d3ed2de)… I certainly wouldn’t expect it to be an issue for the workloads I’m dealing with. Working with PostgreSQL, the libraries I’ve seen for ULID don’t really implement handling the monotonic option at all (it’s been quite awhile since I’ve looked though.)
I think if I were to do anything it would be UUIDv6/7/8 as if it lands as a standard, I’d expect it to have better options for official support in the database.
I’ve entertained using it, but haven’t gone too far. I like that it’s a C extension and that 2ndQuadrant are somewhat behind it. I’m not overly eager to depend on 3rd party extension without a strongly compelling use case which I haven’t got now: the built in stuff is sufficient.
Quite late on this response, but I would clarify a potential misunderstanding: UUIDs are neither Unique nor are they Universal. The “need distributed generation of unique IDs” and “morph into …” comments mask this fact: UUIDs are a fixed entropy and fixed representation of a PUID, or HUID, or MUID, or LPTUID, or whatever you want to call it. The name is a misnomer: UUIDs are a subset of PUIDs, regardless of the name.
