this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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You also definitely shouldn't be using String non-monotonic UUIDs for primary keys in a database, like, literally ever, but what the fuck do I know, I just do databases for a living, I'm not the all-knowing GPT code wizard.
UUIDs make great primary keys in some applications. If you generated 100 trillion UUID4s, there’s about a 1 in a billion chance of finding a duplicate. Thats usually good enough for my databases.
The issue here was that they used a single UUID instead of generating a new one for each record.
There are countless issues here. They didn't do exception handling, they used a string to store their UUIDs (even if this was a DB constraint, you use
sqlalchemy.Uuidand let the ORM and DB handle the translation), and as the person you're replying to stressed, they're using non-monotonic UUIDs. Also if you have a uniqueuser_idand you're never exposing your primary keys, you don't need to get fancy, just let the ORM handle it with auto-incrementing, for most use cases. And so many other tragic things about this one tiny blog post.tl;dr if you're going to copy code you don't understand, copy it from the docs, not from everything in the kitchen thrown into a blender.