Greetings all. I've been poking around the web and trying to track the status of the GUID/UUID patches. In the todo list, that item is not marked as going into 8.3, and I feel this is unfortunate.
Searching google for "postgresql guid -guide" comes up with around 200,000 hits. It's obviously been a popular topic over time. There was some discussion about including a generator in the core or not. Even a random generator (version 4 UUID) would be great in my opinion. The Wikipedia article about UUIDs produces some statistics about a random source ID that are interesting. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUID If you generate 2^41 (2'199'023'255'552) true random ids, the probability of getting a duplicate is 0.000'000'000'000'4. For comparison, the page indicates that the probability of getting hit by a meteorite is 0.000'000'000'06. If there are qualms about a generator that only produces one type of IDs, could the database not just provide a way to generate a "version X" uuid? Some versions would be implemented later. One thing that is quite important, to me at least, is to make the GUID generation functionality cross-platform. Using a random UUID technique for an initial implementation would simplify this issue. Even if the generator is punted to contrib, I would like to see at least native UUID field support in the next version. Patrick ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: don't forget to increase your free space map settings
