Gospel of the GUID - Answers to your Burning Questions, Comments and Insults.

Alex Gorbatchev » Morning Brew #87

Alex Gorbatchev » Morning Brew #87 — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 17:09:16 GMT

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re: Gospel of the GUID - Answers to your Burning Questions, Comments and Insults.

Datagod — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 23:21:43 GMT

LOL, good point. I have used Datagod (small g) as a handle for so long that I forget how cocky it sounds.

re: Gospel of the GUID - Answers to your Burning Questions, Comments and Insults.

wwright — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 03:07:26 GMT

Mr Datagod,

I must be cocky, because all I can think of is smart a%$ responses to you:

1) Someone named DataGOD is calling ME cocky?

2) As the Director of Development for Match.com a while back, I think I have an EXTREMELY good appreciation for high performance applications. However, as I said, those are simply not the norm for most developers and for most applications.

I will say it again, a different way. I don't claim this is the best way to do every single application on the planet... just most of them :)

re: Gospel of the GUID - Answers to your Burning Questions, Comments and Insults.

Datagod — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 01:52:49 GMT

I don't care about the "millions of inserts", but I do care about the "Why does it take so long for my report to run?" and the "Why is my application slower than molasseses in January?" that usually happens when people build applications without thinking about performance up front.

I like your article, but you are coming off a little cocky.

I have been solving performance problems in large database applications for over 14 years. Like I said, I like your reasoning for using GUID's, but I don't think you truly appreciate what a high performance application is all about.

re: Gospel of the GUID - Answers to your Burning Questions, Comments and Insults.

wwright — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 11:14:46 GMT

DOH!

Thanks Richard! Guess I will have to revisit that idea a little more now. I truly need to consider the chance of duplication, but I can't think of the last time one of my apps ran on a box without a NIC. Hmmmm... I will investigate further.

re: Gospel of the GUID - Answers to your Burning Questions, Comments and Insults.

Richard — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 20:11:08 GMT

#3: It's fairly trivial to use NewSequentialId from your object model:

using System;

using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

using System.Security;

[SuppressUnmanagedCodeSecurity]

[DllImport("rpcrt4.dll", SetLastError = true)]

static extern int UuidCreateSequential(out Guid value);

public static Guid NewSequentialGuid()

{

Guid value;

if (0 != UuidCreateSequential(out value))

{

value = Guid.NewGuid();

}

return value;

}

msdn2.microsoft.com/.../aa379322.aspx

re: Gospel of the GUID - Answers to your Burning Questions, Comments and Insults.

Bernal Schooley — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 17:45:30 GMT

Thank you for the great articles. I've been forcing the use of GUID's on my projects for several years now and still continue to run into all the "but why" questions.

The only two concerns that I give any weight to are performance and size.

The size concern is often easily dismissed in 99% of use cases and in the other 1% alternatives should be used and that's ok.

The performance concern is not as easily dismissed. I've always considered it a trade-off that was well worth making given the benefits of GUIDs (specifically the ability to create them in your application layer). Having just read the article by Jimmy Nilsson and his COMB's style GUID solution, I'm thinking we can now have our cake and eat it too.

Morning Brew #88

Morning Brew #88 — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 15:33:05 GMT

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re: Gospel of the GUID - Answers to your Burning Questions, Comments and Insults.

Ken Cox [MVP] — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 01:20:37 GMT

>What happens if we run out of GUIDs?

Right on! Don't believe the people who claim that GUIDs are unique until you see their test plan! We want *proof* with reproducible results, not statistical theory! Show us every GUID that's been made or will be made and *then* we'll know for sure.

I'll bet they're the same people who claim the Universe is infinite. A never-ending universe might be the only explanation that their tiny minds can come up with - but not necessarily the real answer!

<vbg>