[ryanbrunner]

People use UUIDs for more reasons than just making things distributed. You can generate them client side if that's advantageous, you prevent leaking information about how many records there are in the system and prevent guessing of other potential PKs and potential unauthorized access, and there's some optimization strategies that benefit from not relying on a serial PK.

[cbsmith]

If you're obfuscating, then you should be using a DHT to map surrogate keys to internal keys that are more convenient for use in a MySQL index... or just stop using MySQL.

[globular-toast]

Well they shouldn't. UUIDs are for distributed systems. Generating keys client side? That's a distributed system.

[ryanbrunner]

I've had occasional uses for it in systems that aren't distributed at all. It's a handy property of UUIDs, if UUIDs are useful for a particular use case, I'm going to use them, what they're 'supposed' to be for is irrelevant.