ULID: Universally Unique Lexicographically Sortable Identifier

See also Firebase push IDs: https://firebase.googleblog.com/2015/02/the-2120-ways-to-ens... Lexicographically sortable identifiers are critical for any distributed data store if you want anything close to consistency. I've run into the issue of not having them and having to settle for some kind of <autoincrement_id><UUID> key and it's a huge PITA. How this wasn't considered database 101 decades ago just blows my mind. I'd like to see a spec included in this for synchronizing clocks or using RAFT/Paxos for…

Last time this discussion came up, someone shared this nice article[0] about all the different ID options. It mentions Stripe IDs, which have pretty prefixes like "prod_foo" and "user_bar". These are great for users of their API (no wondering what an ID refers to) and for internal tooling and debugging, but have to be stored as inefficient varchars, which is not great for indexing and whatnot. So I spent the weekend creating "UPID"[1], which is like ULID but prefixable! Up…

A question: why include a timestamp? Why not just 80 or 128 bits of pure randomness---if somebody needed a timestamp they could always just append it themselves. And, it seems to me, there would be many instances where you didn't need or want the timestamp.