[pbbakkum]

We encountered some of these same issues and wrote this library to mitigate them: https://github.com/groupon/locality-uuid.java. I think UUIDs make good unique ids overall, particularly in distributed environments where id generation can't be coordinated, but should be used carefully, as the article notes.

[X-Istence]

Why not just use UUID 4:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier#V...

This will have an better distribution for when they are used as keys as well.

[e12e]

As far as I can tell, neither MySQL, nor MariaDB has a function for generating type 4 UUIDs. It's of course possible to generate the UUIDs on the client side, but then it's not really an alternative to auto-incrementing surrogate keys.