Re: UUID's as primary keys

Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 28, 2006 at 09:01:49AM +0200, Thomas Hallgren wrote:
>
>> I'm building an app where I have several entities that are identified
>> using a UUID (i.e. a 128 bit quantity). My current implementation uses a
>> composite primary key consisting of two int8 values. It's a bit
>> cumbersome and I would much rather have a distinct type. An earlier
>> implementation using Oracle mapped the UUID to a RAW(16) but PostgreSQL
>> doesn't have that and the BYTEA adds extra overhead.
>>
>> What would be the best (as in most efficient) mapping for a 128 bit
>> primary key?
>>
>
> Sounds like something for a custom type. There's one here[1] though I
> have no idea how good it is.
>
> [1] http://gborg.postgresql.org/project/pguuid/projdisplay.php
>
> Have a nice day,
>
Thanks. That would of course work but at the same time it increases the
complexity of my app. Yet another component to install and keep track
of. It's also a bit of an overkill since the only thing I need is an
opaque bit storage. Why is it that PostgreSQL lack a fixed length binary
type similar to the RAW type in Oracle? ISTM that could be very useful
and not very hard to implement.

Regards,
Thomas Hallgren