The best UUID type for a database Primary Key

Introduction

In this article, we are going to see what UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) type works best for a database column that has a Primary Key constraint.

While the standard 128-bit random UUID is a very popular choice, you’ll see that this is a terrible fit for a database Primary Key column.

Standard UUID and database Primary Key

A universally unique identifier (UUID) is a 128-bit pseudo-random sequence that can be generated independently without the need for a single centralized system in charge of ensuring the identifier’s uniqueness.

The RFC 4122 specification defines five standardized versions of UUID, which are implemented by various database functions or programming languages.

For instance, the UUID() MySQL function returns a version 1 UUID number.

And the Java UUID.randomUUID() function returns a version 4 UUID number.

For many devs, using these standard UUIDs as a database identifier is very appealing because:

• The ids can be generated by the application. Hence no central coordination is required.
• The chance of identifier collision is extremely low.
• The id value being random, you can safely send it to the UI as the user would not be able to guess other identifier values and use them to see other people’s data.

But, using a random UUID as a database table Primary Key is a bad idea for multiple reasons.

First, the UUID is huge. Every single record will need 16 bytes for the database identifier, and this impacts all associated Foreign Key columns as well.

Second, the Primary Key column usually has an associated B+Tree index to speed up lookups or joins, and B+Tree indexes store data in sorted order.

However, indexing random values using B+Tree causes a lot of problems:

• Index pages will have a very low fill factor because the values come randomly. So, a page of 8kB will end up storing just a few elements, therefore wasting a lot of space, both on the disk and in the database memory, as index pages could be cached in the Buffer Pool.
• Because the B+Tree index needs to rebalance itself in order to maintain its equidistant tree structure, the random key values will cause more index page splits and merges as there is no pre-determined order of filling the tree structure.

If you’re using SQL Server or MySQL, then it’s even worse because the entire table is basically a clustered index.

And all these problems will affect the secondary indexes as well because they store the Primary Key value in the secondary index leaf nodes.

In fact, almost any database expert will tell you to avoid using the standard UUIDs as database table Primary Keys:

TSID – Time-Sorted Unique Identifiers

If you plan to store UUID values in a Primary Key column, then you are better off using a TSID (time-sorted unique identifier).

One such implementation is offered by the TSID Creator OSS library, which provides a 64-bit TSID that’s made of two parts:

• a 42-bit time component
• a 22-bit random component

The random component has two parts:

• a node identifier (0 to 20 bits)
• a counter (2 to 22 bits)

The node identifier can be provided by the tsidcreator.node system property when bootstrapping the application:

The node identifier can also be provided via the TSIDCREATOR_NODE environment variable:

The library is available on Maven Central, so you can get it via the following dependency:

You can create a Tsid object that can use up to 256 nodes like this:

From the Tsid object, we can extract the following values:

• the 64-bit numerical value,
• the Crockford’s Base32 String value that encodes the 64-bit value,
• the Unix milliseconds since epoch that is stored in the 42-bit sequence

To visualize these values, we can print them into the log:

And we get the following output:

When generating ten values:

We can see that the values are monotonically increasing:

Awesome, right?

Using the TSID in your application

Because the default TSID factories provided via the TsidCreator utility comes with a synchronized random value generator, it’s better to use a custom TsidFactory that provides the following optimizations:

• It can generate the random values using a ThreadLocalRandom, therefore avoiding Thread blocking on synchronized blocks
• It can use a small number of node bits, therefore leaving us more bits for the random-generated numerical value.

So, we can define the following TsidUtil that provides us a TsidFactory to use whenever we want to generate a new Tsid object:

And to demonstrate that we don’t get any collision even when using multiple threads on the same application node, we can use the following test case:

When running this test, we get the following result:

Not only the ISID generate was collision-free, but we managed to generate 1.6 million ids in less than 800 milliseconds.

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Conclusion

Using the standard UUID as a Primary Key value is not a good idea unless the first bytes are monotonically increasing.

For this reason, using a time-sorted TSID is a much better idea. Not only that it requires half the number of bytes as a standard UUID, but it fits better as a B+Tree index key.

While SQL Server offers a time-sorted GUID via the NEWSEQUENTIALID, the size of the GUID is 128 bits, so it’s twice as large as a TSID.

The same issue is with version 7 of the UUID specification, which provides a time-sorted UUID. However, it uses the same canonical format (128 bits) which is way too large. The impact of the Primary Key column storage is amplified by every referencing Foreign Key columns.

If all your Primary keys are 128-bit UUIDs, then the Primary Key and Foreign Key indexes are going to require a lot of space, both on the disk and in the database memory, as the Buffer Pool holds both table and index pages.