Re: GUID for postgreSQL

On Jul 27, 2005, at 5:00 PM, Scott Marlowe wrote:

> Then I would think a better thought out solution would be one where
> your
> unique ids ARE guaranteed to be unique, where you used something like
>
> select 'astringuniqtothismachine'||nextval('localsequence');
>
> That really would be guaranteed unique as long as you set up each
> machine to have a string unique to it.


I have implemented this type of approach in distributed systems. The
problem is users who make a copy of their database, continue to use
both copies, and then call you when they try to merge things
together. I would say user opportunity to mess this up is way more
likely than having a GUID collision.

I'm not saying that GUIDs are the ultimate solution to this problem.
The original poster brought up the need to store GUIDs in a database.
There are protocols and standards that require GUIDs and I merely
agree it would be nice to have a GUID data type.



John DeSoi, Ph.D.
http://pgedit.com/
Power Tools for PostgreSQL