Mistakes Beginners Make When Working with Databases

Re:Mistakes Beginners Make When Working with Databases by mercer on Wednesday June 08, 2016 @01:16PM (#11863829)

Could you elaborate on that? I use UUID's at the moment, trusting that they'll be unique, but in part because I don't properly understand them, I feel a little anxiety about the chance of a collision. I sort of assumed they already used timestamps as a basis already, but apparently they do not. Is it just a matter of it being highly improbably of generating the same UUID twice? I'm assuming yes on gut feeling, but I highly distrust that body part these days.

(Edit: I realize I could go look this up myself, but 1) I like explaining things so perhaps you do too, and 2) I'm hoping perhaps at the very least you can point me to a good resource to properly understand this topic)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Mistakes Beginners Make When Working with Databases by lordnacho on Wednesday June 08, 2016 @01:34PM (#11863971)

If you write a sufficiently long series of random digits, it becomes increasingly likely that your number is the only use of that number anywhere in the universe. That's the crux of it.

I'm on a train now, but I think there's also a timestamp element to it somewhere, making it less likely that a restart of the random number generator will cause you to have a collision.

[ Parent | on HN ]