Re: [PATCHES] Patch for UUID datatype (beta)

Completely agreed. I can remove the function from the patch. The
temptation was just too high not to include the new_guid() in the
patch :)


On Mon, 2006-09-18 at 10:33 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Andreas Pflug <pgadmin@pse-consulting.de> writes:
> > Isn't guaranteed uniqueness the very attribute that's expected? AFAIK
> > there's a commonly accepted algorithm providing this.
>
> Anyone who thinks UUIDs are guaranteed unique has been drinking too much
> of the kool-aid.  They're at best probably unique.  Some generator
> algorithms might make it more probable than others, but you simply
> cannot "guarantee" it for UUIDs generated on noncommunicating machines.
>
> One of the big reasons that I'm hesitant to put a UUID generation
> function into core is the knowledge that none of them are or can be
> perfect ... so people might need different ones depending on local
> conditions.  I'm inclined to think that a reasonable setup would put
> the datatype (with input, output, comparison and indexing support)
> into core, but provide a generation function as a contrib module,
> making it easily replaceable.
>
>             regards, tom lane
>