Open Stack

On May 29, 2011, at 9:01 PM, Mark Nottingham wrote:

> WIth regards to UUIDs -- I'm not sure what the use cases being discussed are (sorry for coming in late), but in my experience UUIDs are good fits for cases where you truly need distributed extensibility without coordination. In other uses, they can be a real burden for developers, if for no other reason than their extremely unwieldy syntax. What are the use cases here?


	The primary use case I can think of is a deployment with several zones that are geographically dispersed. Since each zone is shared-nothing with other zones, UUIDs are the most logical choice for instance IDs that need to be unique across zones. This is precisely the use case that UUIDs were created for.

	In my experience, UUIDs are no more of a programmatic burden than any other sort of PK; the only place where they are "unwieldy" is when humans have to type them into a command line or a browser URL. But since most humans doing that would have access to copy/paste, it isn't nearly as bad as it might seem.



-- Ed Leafe



Confidentiality Notice: This e-mail message (including any attached or
embedded documents) is intended for the exclusive and confidential use of the
individual or entity to which this message is addressed, and unless otherwise
expressly indicated, is confidential and privileged information of Rackspace.
Any dissemination, distribution or copying of the enclosed material is prohibited.
If you receive this transmission in error, please notify us immediately by e-mail
at abuse at rackspace.com, and delete the original message.
Your cooperation is appreciated.