RE: Globally Unique IDs?

I believe Oracle's SYS_GUID will return an ID unique *throughout the world*
on *all hosts*. Other software uses GUID's for thinks like COM identifiers.
Typical output looks like:

351e1cc0-2540-11d5-a5cd-00036d15ee51

and is generated through some heuristics involving the current date, time,
MAC address, etc. I don't know the specifics -- except that the ID
generated will not be generated by anyone else anywhere. This would be a
useful addition, IMHO.

Mike Mascari
mascarm@mascari.com

-----Original Message-----
From:    Soma Interesting [SMTP:dfunct@telus.net]
Sent:    Friday, March 30, 2001 2:06 PM
To:    Rose, Keith; pgsql-general@postgresql.org
Subject:    Re: [GENERAL] Globally Unique IDs?

At 01:42 PM 3/30/2001 -0500, you wrote:
>I am new to the mailing list, but not new to postgres.  I did search
through
>the mail-list archives, and didn't find an answer to this question.
 Oracle
>has a concept of a "globally unique ID" which can be gotten from their
>function call SYS_GUID().  Is there any plan to implement this (or
something
>analogous) in a future version of Postgres?


I'm far from an expert with Postgresql, but I was just thinking the other
day that you could probably use a single "sequence" in postgres for a
number of tables to make sure id's are unique across multiple tables.

If your not familiar with sequences, see here:
http://www.postgresql.org/devel-corner/docs/user/datatype.html#DATATYPE-
SERIAL



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