Re: UUID column as pimrary key?

On Jan 6, 2011, at 8:19 AM, Michael Satterwhite wrote:

> That would be a matter of incompetent administration. *NOTHING* can protect
> against that.

Well, no, not necessarily. It might well be a goal (in fact, is a goal with some software that I'm developing), that
users/adminsdon't have to worry about data caches moving across machines. My primary point, which I stated
incompletely,was that in order to depend on node ids as part of unique ids, requires a degree of control over the
administrationof nodes, and for a given application this might or might not be practical. For instance, if your app
runson cell phones, and the OSs you deploy on give you access to the device id, and you don't mind using a rather long
prefixto form your unique ids, then you have an obvious solution that, as far as I know, is guaranteed to be unique.
(Ignoringthe possibility of hacking of the device id, because no matter what you choose as a prefix, if an adversary
managesto deliberately change the prefix, you can get duplicates.) My secondary point was that this is rather difficult
todetect in time to prevent conflicts. 

--
Scott Ribe
scott_ribe@elevated-dev.com
http://www.elevated-dev.com/
(303) 722-0567 voice