Why simpler identifiers often beat UUIDs for most applications
By
Sedat Kapanoglu
Summary
The article discusses the author's experience building Eksi Sozluk, a popular Turkish web site, starting in 1999 with primitive tools (a single text file on FTP). It explores the evolution of record identifiers — from no identifiers to auto-increment IDs to UUIDs — and argues that for most applications, simpler identifiers like auto-increment integers or short random strings are sufficient and preferable over UUIDs due to performance, storage, and readability concerns.
Source
bskyWhy simpler identifiers often beat UUIDs for most applicationsssg.devKey quotes
· 3 pulledMy troubles with record identifiers starts with a web site I developed, Eksi Sozluk.
All I had access to was their FTP server. So, I improvised and decided to keep every record in a single text file. Yeah, bad idea, but it worked at the beginning.
There were no record identifiers, only topics and free-form list of entries. Deleting a specific record involved me downloading a...
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