I was thinking UUID was not a very good choice for id. Serial would be a better one because I don't have a billion customers. It is more like a thousand. So when I saw the customer ID of the payment gateway cannot accept more than 32 characters, I thought UUID is overkill. So I want to migrate to using a serial int instead as the primary key.,
On Wed, Oct 7, 2020 at 10:48 PM Francisco Olarte <fola...@peoplecall.com> wrote: > Hemil: > > On Wed, Oct 7, 2020 at 2:49 PM Hemil Ruparel <hemilruparel2...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > I was integrating a payment gateway for my app when I noticed its > maximum length of customer id string is 32. SIze of UUID is 36 (32 > characters and 4 dashes). So I want to change the type of customer id to > serial. The problem is by now, the column is being used at many places. How > to migrate the column to serial without dropping the data? > > An uuid is just a 128 bit number, as noted by many. Your problem is > the default encoding is 32 hex digits plus 4 hyphens. If your payment > gateway uses a 32 CHARs string ( "maximum length of customer id > string is 32" ) you can just use other encodings. Passing to integer > and using decimal wont cut it ( you'll need 39 digits ), but using > just hex (without hyphens) will drop the string representation to 32 > characters ( you can encode with a subst and postgres accepts it > without hyphens ). > > If you want to buy a little more space for your own purposes you can > even fit 128 bits in 22 base64 chars with a couple pairs of bits to > spare, and IIRC you can do it with a creative decode/encode step after > killing the dashes. > > And if your payment gateway uses unicode codepoints instead of ASCII > chars as units you could probably use more creative encodings ;-) , > but probably using a "drop the dashes" subst in the interface will be > your simpler option. > > Francisco Olarte. >
