But sometimes you have to make these keys public, e.g. as user or other resource IDs. You want to make them UUIDs so they won't be predictable. Not having to join everywhere with the UUID-to-artificial-PK table may be a bigger performance win than the losses from larger size of UUIDs.
Sometimes you have a distributed / sharded system, and don't want the keys to clash, and also avoid assigning ranges. Sometimes you have to accept someone else's ID, not originating in your system. In cases like that, large random numbers, e.g. UUID v4, work reasonably well.
Of course when you just have one DB, and a relative slow stream of new rows, it's easy to fully control PK creation. And this covers the majority of practical cases.
https://github.com/estuary/flow/blob/master/supabase/migrati...
we use macaddr8 instead of bigint, because it has a postgres serialization / JSON encoding which lossless-ly round-trips with browsers and it works well with PostgREST. The same CANNOT be said for bigint, which is a huge footgun.
You are writing your data into a DBMS. Coordinating the creation of primary keys is one of the cheapest tasks around, if you can't do that, how is your database still online?
> Or where you cannot allow them to be predictable.
You don't need to export your PKs for the rest of the world. You can have non-predictable data outside of your PK. Yes, a different column will still have some of the problems with index maintenance, but it becomes a much smaller problem if only one table cares about the value.