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Re:Exploring PostgreSQL 18's new UUIDv7 support by ibejoeb on Friday October 17, 2025 @05:31PM (#45622339)
There are some practical applications that are not necessarily related to security. If you are storing something like a medical record, you don't want use it as a public ID for a patient visit, because the date is subject to HIPAA.
Re:Exploring PostgreSQL 18's new UUIDv7 support by mulmen on Friday October 17, 2025 @08:14PM (#45623622)
[delayed]
Re:Exploring PostgreSQL 18's new UUIDv7 support by ownagefool on Saturday October 18, 2025 @05:39AM (#45626086)
This is probably not really true.

You wouldn't be publishing patient visits publically, the only folks that'd legitimatly see that record would be those which access to that visit, and they'd most likely need to know the time of said visit. This access should be controlled via AuthN, AuthZ and audited.

You'd also generally do a lot of time-based lookups on this data; what visits do I have today, this week, and so on. You might also want an additional DateTime field for timezones and offsets, but the v7 is probably better than v4 for this usecase.

Re:Exploring PostgreSQL 18's new UUIDv7 support by tracker1 on Monday October 20, 2025 @12:02PM (#45645444)
Can you please give me a legitimate use case where you would have the ID of a medical case without also having the Date/Time of that corresponding record?
Re:Exploring PostgreSQL 18's new UUIDv7 support by ibejoeb on Monday October 20, 2025 @12:31PM (#45645787)
It's not that you can't possess the timestamp of an event. It's that you can't publish certain things that are deemed potentially identifiable.

Dates are specifically cited as potential vectors for de-anonymization. For example, you can't disclose that "Bob H presented to the clinic on October 10th" because that's a lot of information that can be used to find out who Bob H is.

Here's a practical example of what I'm talking about. Suppose you have an app for physicians that allows them to message each other to discuss a case. They can share relevant information for diagnostic purposes, e.g., "34y/o male from the southern Louisianna presented with a rash." They share de-identified photos and chat about ddx, treatment protocol, etc. All of that is cool. However, if the record of that visit is identified with a UUIDv7, and that ID is used as part of the URL you've exposed the time of the visit, and that would be a problem.