[ThereIsNoWorry]

You wouldn't believe how often I have to fight for UUIDs instead of sequencing. UUIDs are great. For all practical purposes 0 possibility of collision; you can use it as an ID in a global system, it just makes so much fucking sense.

But the default is still a number natural number sequence. As if it matters for 99% of all cases that stuff is "ordered" and "easily identifiable" by a natural number.

But then you want to merge something or make double use and suddenly you have a huge problem that it isn't unique anymore and you need more information to identify.

Guess what, an UUID does that job for you, across multiple databases and distributed systems, a UUID is still unique with 99.9999% probability.

The one counter-example every 10 years can be cared for manually.

[beachy]

As far as I know the only practical downside with UUIDs in the modern age - unless you like using keys for ordering by creation time, or you have such enormous volumes that storage is a consideration - is that they are cumbersome for humans to read and compare, e.g scanning log files.

And in any case the German tank problem means that you often can't use incrementing numbers as surrogate keys if they are ever exposed to the public e.g in urls.

[mrkeen]

> they are cumbersome for humans to read and compare, e.g scanning log files.

I think the positive still outweighs the negative here: you can search your whole company's logs for a UUID and you won't get false positives like you would with serial integers.

[akira2501]

I've been using UUIDv7 a lot lately and I've been quite happy with the results.