Another wonderful reason to use UUIDs across systems: Consider what happens when... | Hacker News

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Terr_ on June 10, 2017 | parent | context | favorite | on: Be Careful with UUID or GUID as Primary Keys

Another wonderful reason to use UUIDs across systems: Consider what happens when one system's database has an accident, gets restored from a backup, and then starts generating numeric IDs which -- from the perspective of the other systems -- are duplicates.

Best case scenario, things break cleanly and you have to fix up your auto-incrementing counters. Worse is when you start getting data corruption because some remote system has its information about "Customer 11492" (who registered yesterday) overwritten by details for "Customer 11492" who registered today.

Spooky23 on June 10, 2017 [–]

Exactly.

Also consider that you commonly have systems that you cannot control. What's the internal representatation of s user or action in a SaaS app?

Don't know, don't care. I slurp in data, with UUID as an attribute!

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