Re: uuid type for postgres

On Sep 6, 2005, at 6:02 PM, Josh Berkus wrote:

> Bob, People,
>
> Let me clarify my stance here, because it seems to be getting
> misrepresented.
>
> Mark (and Nathan) pushed at repaired UUID type for possible
> inclusion in
> the core PostgreSQL distribution. I'm not opposed to that,
> provided that
> the portability, licensing, and bugs are worked out. Why not? We
> have
> ipv6 data types, after all.
>
> However, Mark went on to suggest that we should recommend UUID over
> SERIAL
> in the docs, and that we could consider dropping SERIAL entirely in
> favor
> of UUID:
>
> ---quoth Mark------------------
> I suggest that UUID be recommended in place of SERIAL for certain
> classes of applications, and that it therefore belongs in the core.
> UUID and SERIAL can be used together (although, once you have a
> UUID, it may not be useful to also have a SERIAL).
> ---------------------------------
>
> This was what I objected to; I believe that the use-case for UUIDs is
> actually quite narrow and assert that it's a very bad idea to
> promote them
> to most users.

I agree with you (Josh) completely, which is why I said:
"If the documentation gives the user a good idea of when to use UUID
and when not, I think it would be a good addition."

.. the fact that the use-cases are narrow was implicit :)

Everything else I talked about was just implementation details.
Summary: there are (several) UUID implementations out there that are
appropriately licensed and easy enough to use, and a lot of OSes ship
with pretty good implementations already. Creating a decent UUID
type should be relatively trivial, as far as those things go.

-bob