This lesson was burned into my psyche waaaay back in the Clinton administration. It was my task to speed up a five hour batch job which read input records from a flat file, did some validations and then inserted them. Simply sorting the input file on the primary key fields -- we used natural keys, not synthetics -- dropped the run time to two hours. (VMS SORT saved the day, because you could tell it the sort order you wanted; thus, I could preserve the header record at the top of the file, and the trailer record at the end of the file without jumping through a bunch of hoops.)
On 1/28/23 19:44, Benedict Holland
wrote:
Why is it a terrible idea? I have been using them for years without a single problem. I don't rely on them for create order. Terrible seem a bit extreme.
Thanks,Ben
On Sat, Jan 28, 2023, 3:39 PM Erik Wienhold <ewie@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 27/01/2023 01:48 CET Ron <ronljohnsonjr@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On 1/26/23 15:55, Erik Wienhold wrote:
> >
> > There are arguments against sequential PK, e.g. they give away too much info and
> > allow attacks such as forced browsing[2]. The first I can understand: you may
> > not want to reveal the number of users or customers. But access control should
> > prevent forced browsing.
>
> Shouldn't your application layer isolate the users from the database? UUIDs
> are all over the DBs I manage, but the PKs are all sequences.
Yes, I meant the application layer, not Postgres' access control.
--
Erik
--
Born in Arizona, moved to Babylonia.
Born in Arizona, moved to Babylonia.
