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

[Cris J Holdorph]

I almost completely agree with Matt.  I would bring up one additional 
point though.

URLs

You mention one of the only benefits would be in saving some bytes in 
the database.  However, I think another very small benefit, would be in 
saving some characters in URLs that might be shared.

e.g., if I tell someone to visit the Sakai site (this site does not exist):

http://sakai.unicon.net/portal/site/f7dc1ffb-6bd2-43e0-811f-d58cd12ffa79

using a different/shorter guid, could result in a shorter url, e.g.,

http://sakai.unicon.net/portal/site/XhcsnjHjIWc

I still think the guaranteed uniqueness across sakai installations is 
very important, and I'd prefer to maintain that benefit even if it meant 
having to keep the existing long GUIDs.

---- Cris J H

On 01/08/2014 10:19 AM, Matthew Jones wrote:
> 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 <mailto: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>
>     [mailto: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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