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A comment on Database IDs Have No Place in URIs (2008). Parent comment

Re:Database IDs Have No Place in URIs (2008) by kevin_thibedeau on Friday May 10, 2019 @12:54PM (#19879677)
I once scraped a representative slice of Slashdot comments a while back and noticed some odd changes in their UIDs. They were originally sequential and then they switched to even numbers for a while, then odd numbers. I don't know if they were doing it to juice the UID stats to look like more people were joining the platform.
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Re:Database IDs Have No Place in URIs (2008) by cesarb on Friday May 10, 2019 @01:12PM (#19879904)
> They were originally sequential and then they switched to even numbers for a while, then odd numbers.

That sounds like they wanted to migrate to another cluster, and wanted to have both clusters running at the same time (for testing) without risking an ID overlap, so they turned the least significant bit of the ID into a cluster identifier. The older cluster was 0 (even numbers), the new cluster was 1 (odd numbers).

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