[mlyle]

It's explicitly monotonic, except for apps that have a very fast ID rate, in which case there are recommended approaches (the word "SHOULD" is used in an RFC) to make it work. And PostgreSQL used one of these recommended approaches and documented it.

[Dylan16807]

> It's explicitly monotonic, except for apps that have a very fast ID rate

"might generate two IDs in the same millisecond" is not a very exotic occurrence. It makes a big difference whether the rest is guaranteed or not.

> And PostgreSQL used one of these recommended approaches and documented it.

Well that's the center of the issue, right? OP's interpretation was that PostgreSQL did not document such, and so it shouldn't be relied upon. If it is a documented promise, then things are fine.

But is it actually in the documentation? A source code comment saying it uses a certain method isn't a promise that it will always use that method.

[dragonwriter]

> Well that’s the center of the issue, right? OP’s interpretation was that PostgreSQL did not document such, and so it shouldn’t be relied upon.

And the correct answer is…we don’t know. We have a commit that landed and the explanation of the commit; we don’t have the documentation for the corresponding release of Postgres, because…it doesn’t exist yet. Because monoticity is an important feature for UUIDv7, it would be very odd if Postgres used an implementation that took the extra effort to use a nanosecond-level time value as the high-order portion of the variant part of the UUID instead of the minimum millisecond-level time, but not document that, but any assumption about what will be the documented, reliable-going-forward advertised feature is speculative until the documentation exists and is finalized.

OTOH, its perfectly fine to talk about what the implementation allows now, because that kind of thing is important to the decision about what should be documented and committed to going forward.

[pests]

The point of the extra bits is to allow the application developer to keep monotonicity in the "not very exotic occurrence" scenario. The purpose is to be monotonic. I feel like you are missing the core concept.

[Dylan16807]

I'm not missing anything, the problem is a lot of people using sloppy wording or mixing up the two modes.

This comment thread is about the guaranteed level of monotonicity. Yes, those bits exist. But you can't depend on them from something that only promises "UUIDv7". You need an additional promise that it's configured that way and actually using those bits to maintain monotonicity.