[da_chicken]

> I use char(36), as it's easier to query manually when needed, but I' looking into binary(16) for those billion row tables.

I would use whatever data type your RBDMS's UUID generator returns or the programming language your application is written in. If your RDBMS supports a UUID or GUID data type, however, I would 100% use that because you'll invariably have functions which help you deal with it.

Remember, however, that many (most?) RDBMSs store records in pages (or blocks) of a fixed size typically between 4KB or 8 KB, and they won't allow a record to span a page (usually when a record is too long for one page, non-key data will be moved to non-paged storage which is slower). In other words, if you reduce your record size by 20 bytes you might not actually see as big a change as you'd expect. You'd be storing less data per record, but you're maybe not changing the records per page. You're not increasing the efficiency of your data store at all because of how the data is physically stored. It also means that the answer might be different for each table since each table has a different row size.

Bottom line, however, is that I would favor storing UUIDs the way your particular RDBMS vendor tells you they should be stored. If your application has particular problems with storing UUIDs that way I would look at alternatives, but generally the RDBMS vendors have thought about this a little bit at least.

[nvivo]

MySql doesn't have a UUID data type, the UUID() function returns a varchar. The way you store it is mostly preference and driver defaults. The C# driver used to handle binary(16) as Guids, then they deprecated that in favor of CHAR(36). But when dealing with a bilion rows, each byte counts and I'll favor binary(16) because it's smaller and that helps with the index sizes and memory usage.

[th3sly]

but it supports conversion to binary (+shuffle to keep order) using "uuid_to_bin"

[nvivo]

Yes, but this is new to mysql 8, which is pretty recent. Also, I always use uuid v4 to explicitly prevent any ordering.