Re:Understanding How UUIDs Are Generated
by jepler on Wednesday September 30, 2020 @08:50PM
(#24645997)
8 bytes will have a non-negligible (say, 1 in 1 million) chance of generating the same identifier twice even if you only generate a few million million IDs -- see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem#Probability_t... and look at the "16 hex digits" row. Depending on your use case, this may or may not be a problem.
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Microsoft research has a great blog post on this.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20160114-00/?p=92...
TLDR: It's far more likely for a UUIDv1 to be corrupted to a collision due to memory errors and bit-flips, than for two UUIDv4 to collide.
TLDRTLDR: All computing is approximate at scale.