Re: UUID data format 4x-4x-4x-4x-4x-4x-4x-4x

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 06:45:18PM -0500, Mark Mielke wrote:
> My personal opinion is that this is entirely a philosophical issue, and
> that both sides have merits.

I think it depends on what you're optimising for: initial development
time, maintaince time or run time.

> There is no reason for PostgreSQL to
> support all formats, not matter how non-standard, for every single type.
> So, why would UUID be special? Because it's easy to do is not
> necessarily a good reason. But then, it's not a bad reason either.

I never really buy the "performance" argument. I much prefer the
correctness argument, if the code is doing something strange I'd prefer
to know about it as soon as possible. This generally means that I'm
optimising for maintaince.

It's a similar argument to why lots of automatic casts were removed from
8.3, it generally doesn't hurt but the few times it does it's going to
be bad and if you're doing something strange to start with it's better
to be explicit about it.

Sam