On Jul 27, 2005, at 5:00 PM, Scott Marlowe wrote:
Then I would think a better thought out solution would be one where
your
unique ids ARE guaranteed to be unique, where you used something like
select 'astringuniqtothismachine'||nextval('localsequence');
That really would be guaranteed unique as long as you set up each
machine to have a string unique to it.
I have implemented this type of approach in distributed systems. The
problem is users who make a copy of their database, continue to use
both copies, and then call you when they try to merge things
together. I would say user opportunity to mess this up is way more
likely than having a GUID collision.
I'm not saying that GUIDs are the ultimate solution to this problem.
The original poster brought up the need to store GUIDs in a database.
There are protocols and standards that require GUIDs and I merely
agree it would be nice to have a GUID data type.
John DeSoi, Ph.D.
http://pgedit.com/
Power Tools for PostgreSQL
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