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Adrian B.G.
Adrian B.G.

Posted on • Updated on • Originally published at coder.today

From monolith to cloud: Auto Increment to UUID

This article was originally published on my website https://coder.today/software-engineer-from-monolith-to-cloud-auto-increment-to-uuid-a62f92f387c4

From monolith to cloud series 🌩

A series of articles designed to help developers switch from a monolith to a cloud mindset. The web is full of very good tutorials and examples on Why and How to make the switch, so I decided to focus on the small details.

This article focuses on the developers who worked only with numeric auto increment primary keys and need/want to switch to UUID’s.

ID int NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT 🔢

Entries in a relational database like MySql/SQL/Oracle are usually identified by an incremental, unique (to table) number int(2232). The server collects the parameters, sends an INSERT(...) statement and the database generates a new ID (the next incremental value) and returns it.

When you begin to scale you may end up with a bottleneck, your MySql master instance, because that is the only entity from your system that can generate a unique identifier.

You already know the benefits of an auto increment PK’s , here is a list of its limits:

  • need to have access (through a pipeline/API/server/connection) to the master instance
  • you depend on 1 instance from 1 server from 1 data-center (latency, availability)
  • all the write operations are done in a single location (most of the cases), this leads to a hardware limitation of generating new ID’s
  • easy to spoof ID’s (bonus: you can easily find out the number of customers)
  • MAX_INT — it’s a long shot, but still …worth mentioning

All of these issues can be mitigated to a degree (ex MySql sharding). To fix all of them you can use UUID’s.

UUID

UUID 🍱

An universally unique identifier (UUID) is a 128-bit number used to identify information in computer systems. The term globally unique identifier (GUID) is also used. The size of the UUID can differ on implementations.

UUID can be used in relationship databases and viceversa, auto incrementing in NoSql.

In its canonical textual representation it’s a 32 hexadecimal (base 16) digits, displayed in five groups separated by 4 hyphens: 123e4567-e89b-12d3-a456-426655440000.

Some bits represent the UUID version (the algorithm used to generate it), others the variant. Starting from a UUID format you can even add your own logic (bits representing some aspects of your business logic).

To generate the random bytes of the UUID more factors are used to ensure a better entropy like the timestamp and the clock sequence. For more technical details you can read the Official Protocol paper of the UUID. Beware of the implementation you use, not all the libraries respect the standard. I have found some implementations that just use the predictable pseudo-random function found in every language to generate a number.

Basically the UUID/GUID is a random ID, the values are not sequential and anyone can create a new ID.

There are a few advantages over a linear incremental value

  • it’s easier to shard
  • it’s easier to merge/replicate. There is no universal order.
  • more flexibility — you can generate UUID’s outside of the database, delegate to servers or clients, environment/platform independent, but you may lose some data integrity
  • you can even allow offline register (and sync when available), but you will never have a full DB snapshot (because of the out of sync clients)
  • scaling —UUID has a large…r limit of ID’s than an INT
  • you know the ID before the insert, it can simplify the logic/flow
  • the UUID can have your own format, you can split it in 4 numbers and each one of them represent something else, for example if you group the users from 20 websites, the first number can represent the application.

Monolith vs Cloud: AUTO PKID vs UUID

The new mindset 🤕

You will have to get used to a more difficult debugging process, UUID’s are impossible to remember. The trick of memorizing the first or last characters will probably not work.

The change is hard (any change) for the human brain, you will try to fight it, most likely using cheap reasons: an INT is prettier, occupies less storage space. Embrace the change for a greater good, is part of the software evolution.

New factors in town based on async: time and location. An UUID may exists somewhere, but is not synced YET or it’s in other shard. There is no universal sync view anymore. Your production is in chaos now, distribution can mess up your karma, don’t feel frustrated, is just another way of doing stuff.

A few bad things can result of distribution: duplicate or lost data. This means extra coding and extra meetings to explain why and how to the product owners.

I do not think that UUID are universal better or worst than incremental ID’s, they just serve different purposes. But …

I will recommend using UUID’s for any new apps, the current state of software needs demand iXXXt (scaling apps, multiple type of clients & platforms, offline apps…).

Before you go, I recommend reading some more:

Thanks!

Please (like)👏 and subscribe if you learned something new. Send me your feedback so I can improve the following posts.

Top comments (6)

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rhymes profile image
rhymes

You will have to get used to a more difficult debugging process, UUID’s are impossible to remember. The trick of memorizing the first or last characters will probably not work.

I feel KSUIDs are a good compromise. You have secure IDs like with UUIDs but they are roughly sortable (and you can memorize a bit): github.com/segmentio/ksuid

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bgadrian profile image
Adrian B.G.

Wow nice, my brain just got bigger.

Also I found this on the ksuid repo segment.com/blog/a-brief-history-o... which is a good extra for my article.

KSUID look nice, and knowing what Segment.io does I see their need for such a thing.

KSUIDs are 20-bytes: a 32-bit unsigned integer UTC timestamp and a 128-bit randomly generated payload. The timestamp uses big-endian encoding, to allow lexicographic sorting. The timestamp epoch is adjusted to March 5th, 2014, providing over 100 years of useful life starting at UNIX epoch + 14e8. The payload uses a cryptographically-strong pseudorandom number generator.

It is like a json web token with a timestamp and crypto-randomness, sounds like a cookie treat.

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biros profile image
Boris Jamot ✊ /

I just switched from a PHP/MySQL app with auto-incremented ID to a Go/Mongodb app with UUID.
The main drawback I noticed is that you can't use internal mongodb document's ObjectId for your queries. It makes your code a bit more complex:

With auto-increment:

query := collection.FindId(1)

With UUID:

query := collection.Find(bson.M{"id": "123e4567-e89b-12d3-a456-426655440000"})

And it's the same for update, remove & upsert.

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bgadrian profile image
Adrian B.G. • Edited

Yes because ObjectID is a BSON object, and adds more text along the way.

You can use other types, like a string with a UUID, but you have to provide the _id at insert and you have to be sure they are unique. MongoDB will add an _id only if is missing and it will be an ObjectId.

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rafalpienkowski profile image
Rafal Pienkowski

There is one point here:

"Entries in a relational database like MySql/SQL/Oracle are usually identified by an incremental, unique (to table) number int(2232). The server collects the parameters, sends an INSERT(...) statement and the database generates a new ID (the next incremental value) and returns it."

Unfortunately, Oracle (unlike MS SQL, MySql) doesn't support an auto-increment data type. You have to create a combination of sequence and trigger for the PR key column. If I good remember Oracle decided to resign from that type of data structure due to performance reasons.

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bgadrian profile image
Adrian B.G.

They got that right, auto increment is a bottle neck in a heavy-write app. But still is funny to see the words Oracle and Performance in the same sentence.