Exploring alternatives to UUIDv4; Enter ULIDs.

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2024-12-28 19:30:06

UUIDv4 is a commonly used unique identifier format. UUIDv4 is a standardized format for generating unique identifiers that are widely used in distributed systems. Recently there have attempts to introduce new identifier formats that are shorter, url-friendly, lexographically sortable, collision-safe during generation.

When creating both UUIDs and ULIDs, the process of generating ULIDs is a little slower when producing 100 million values, and the difference is negligible when generating and inserting 1 million values. Generating ULIDs are slower than UUIDs, though, the benefits of a sortable globally unique identifier make the tradeoff worth it.

When inserting ULIDs, it takes about 3.27x longer than UUIDs inserts. This reflects the additional computational overhead for inserting ULIDs.

Timing information can be unintentionally exposed through ULIDs, revealing the speed at which a particular resource is generated. By analyzing ULIDs, it becomes possible to deduce the rate at which a service is generating events, thereby disclosing potentially valuable competitive data that should remain confidential.