Why I use UUIDs for primary/foreign keys

[eluser]gtech[/eluser]
GUIDs as row ids... what an interesting idea, to be fair the decheslow has said that the big disadvantage is performance.

When I update a database row I usually keep a separate table of who/when and what, so I know when a rows been inserted and who insterted it.

On the usuability issue, not all applications pass ids through the url.. and to be fair mabee I dont want a user to be able to guess ids, urls do not really have to look 'friendly'

as to the argument about there being a clash eventually... I not sure with 16^32 possible combinations it is quite unlikely on a database with even a million ids.

I think the biggest benifit is if you were considering merging databases, or even distributing data.

Thanks for the heads up, I will probably use normal ids for now, but I might look into other projects that use GUIDS.

[url="http://databases.aspfaq.com/database/what-should-i-choose-for-my-primary-key.html"] interesting article [/url]