On Sep 6, 2005, at 6:02 PM, Josh Berkus wrote:
Bob, People,
Let me clarify my stance here, because it seems to be getting
misrepresented.
Mark (and Nathan) pushed at repaired UUID type for possible
inclusion in
the core PostgreSQL distribution. I'm not opposed to that,
provided that
the portability, licensing, and bugs are worked out. Why not? We
have
ipv6 data types, after all.
However, Mark went on to suggest that we should recommend UUID over
SERIAL
in the docs, and that we could consider dropping SERIAL entirely in
favor
of UUID:
---quoth Mark------------------
I suggest that UUID be recommended in place of SERIAL for certain
classes of applications, and that it therefore belongs in the core.
UUID and SERIAL can be used together (although, once you have a
UUID, it may not be useful to also have a SERIAL).
---------------------------------
This was what I objected to; I believe that the use-case for UUIDs is
actually quite narrow and assert that it's a very bad idea to
promote them
to most users.
I agree with you (Josh) completely, which is why I said:
"If the documentation gives the user a good idea of when to use UUID
and when not, I think it would be a good addition."
.. the fact that the use-cases are narrow was implicit :)
Everything else I talked about was just implementation details.
Summary: there are (several) UUID implementations out there that are
appropriately licensed and easy enough to use, and a lot of OSes ship
with pretty good implementations already. Creating a decent UUID
type should be relatively trivial, as far as those things go.
-bob
---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
TIP 1: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate
subscribe-nomail command to [EMAIL PROTECTED] so that your
message can get through to the mailing list cleanly