Ok, I see. In fact I'd be happy to reduce it to 12 characters instead of 36, as long as it's enough to store all my data. But since it's enough for YouTube I guess that'd be enough for me.
1) So, should I only save the farthest right characters (i.e '42665d440a17' in the following example)? 550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-42665d440a17 But wouldn't there be conflict if another UUID is generated like the following (i.e. different except for the 12 characters on the right)? 810e8ba7-f13c-5de8-821a-42665d440a17 2) Also, if I decide to save, say, 16 characters. Should I keep the 16 characters on the right after stripping off the dashes? 3) One last question. Which algorithm is best to use? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5? According to Wikipedia [1], the #5 is most secure, but I don't know if security would actually be an issue for referencing objects in the database. Thanks! Julien [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uuid On Apr 6, 2:16 pm, Peter of the Norse <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Mar 31, 2008, at 6:20 AM, Julien wrote: > > > What do you think is best practice? Also, how do you explain that > > youtube, for example, only uses a dozen characters (and not 36 like a > > UUID) to identify videos? > > UUIDs are designed to be unique within a database no matter how many > tables or rows are used. Not only that, but they are likely to be > unique even after two databases are merged. So if YouTube and Google > and the US Federal Gonverment and all the rest of the databases in the > world were using UUIDs, and they all merged into one huge Omni- > database, there would be ~40% chance of conflict. Since that's not > likely to happen any time soon, 12 characters are enough. And if > YouTube and Vidder merge, they can just add a y/v to the end and > that's good enough. > > -- > Peter of the Norse --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django users" group. To post to this group, send email to django-users@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-users?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
