[sgarland]

> You then have the overhead of encrypting/decrypting every client-facing ID before querying the database.

As opposed to the overhead of generating a UUID? It may be fast, but it’s still overhead.

> code workarounds in many frameworks … they expect keys in URL paths

I personally despise this practice, not least of which because then your URL has a UUID (because it’s always UUIDs) in it, which is ugly; it also gives ammunition to the argument of using v4 so as to not expose time-based information. I still doubt that the latter matters, and think that it’s a hypothetical dreamt up by the same kind of people who shard their database and use Kafka at tiny startups because “we might need it.”

> very efficient indexing

You are of course correct that the sorted prefix helps the B+tree immensely, but you can’t get around the 16 bytes (or worse, if stored as a string) vs. 8 bytes or smaller for other types. Despite what people seem to think, this does add up, it does impact your buffer pool, and it does slow down queries.