openstack team mailing list archive

[Jay Pipes <jaypipes@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 1:18 PM, George Reese <george.reese@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I hate UUIDs with a passion.
>
> * They are text fields, which means slower database indexes

Text fields are stored on disk/in memory as bytes the same as any
integer. It's that the number of bytes needed to store it is greater,
resulting in larger indexes and more bytes to store the keys. But, as
Jorge mentioned, some databases have native support for large-integer
types like UUIDs.

> * They are completely user-unfriendly. The whole "copy and paste" argument borders on silliness

Yes, it's not easy to remember UUIDs. That's why virtually every
resource has some other way of identifying themselves. Typically, this
is a name attribute, though not all resources enforce uniqueness on
the name attribute, thus the need for a unique identifier.

I don't see people manually looking up resources based on UUIDs. I see
*machines* manually looking up resources based on UUIDs, and humans
looking up resources by, say, name, or (name, tenant_id) or (name,
user_id), etc.

> * And uniqueness across regions for "share nothing" can be managed with a variety of alternative options without resorting to the ugliness that is UUIDs

Like URIs? I don't know of any other options that would work. Please
let us know what you think about in this respect.

-jay