[Building Sakai] Idea: Change the GUID generator for Sakai

[Matthew Jones]

This is the "standard" format. [1] You can base64 or some other encode this
to save a few bytes, trading space for CPU and performance complexity. I'm
not sure what's better.

The youtube format has a smaller number set, but their algorithm that
generates the number the backing value guarantees uniqueness only based on
that internal value, and it's not randomly picked.

I believe that the initial reason for using GUID (instead of just auto
increment which would have been more efficient) was so you could take this
data in one Sakai system, and move it over to another Sakai system. If you
used something that was based on an algorithm which was active on another
system on fixed numbers, you'd very certainly have collisions. With GUID,
the possibility of this is the same as the possibility on the same system.

The way MySQL and Oracle index these text values, there really isn't any
performance problem with retrieval, so you're really only looking at the
savings in a few bytes of storage per GUID. I think, unless you're changing
this data type all the way down to a numeric value like an INT/NUMBER,
there won't be too much of a noticeable gain?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globally_unique_identifier


On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 12:09 PM, Adam Marshall <adam.marshall at it.ox.ac.uk>wrote:

> In the words of Borat: "I like".
>
> adam
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: sakai-dev-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org [mailto:
> sakai-dev-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org] On Behalf Of Charles Severance
> Sent: 08 January 2014 17:02
> To: dev sakai
> Subject: [Building Sakai] Idea: Change the GUID generator for Sakai
>
> Hi all,
>
> I am wondering if we should just change the guid generator for Sakai to
> generate something smaller.  Out GUIDs are
>
> 8923c6aa-794f-43f0-8ea2-dc6f96556d6b
>
> Things like YouTube have much more dense guids like
>
> XhcsnjHjIWc
>
> I don't know if there are reliable and yet short guids that use things
> like upper and lower case letters, etc.  Our GUIDs are HEX - not the
> densest.
>
> I am not talking about any conversion of old GUIDs - just new ones.
>
> What do folks think...
>
> /Chuck
>
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