Universally Unique Identifiers, also known as UUIDs, are designed
to allow developers to generate unique IDs in a way that
guarantees uniqueness without knowledge of other systems. These
are especially useful in a distributed architecture, where you
have a number of systems and databases responsible for creating
records. You might think that using UUIDs as a primary key in a
database is a great idea, but when used incorrectly, they can
drastically hurt database performance.
In this article, you'll learn about the downsides of using UUIDs
as a primary key in your MySQL database.
The many versions of UUIDs
At the time of this writing, there are five official versions of
UUIDs and three proposed versions. Let's take a look at each
version to better understand how they work.
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