[ww520]

I meant the key handed off to the user for human interaction. As a user I would prefer order number 7356 than 7458e3a9-716b-4352-b2e4-b5b67d0c089b.

If there's no human interaction with the key, UUID is perfectly fine.

[mhd]

I've seen scenarios where UUIDs were used intentionally for this, to prevent users who get a full export of table data to reference the UUID. If it's just a sequence of small integers they might them to more permanent and intrinsically tied to the data, whereas UUIDs seem more like computing artifacts.

Yeah, I know, this could easily fixed by not friggin' showing surrogate keys to those users in the first place, but, well, data integration is ugly business.

[irl_zebra]

Gotcha, just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something. Makes total sense, thanks!