Web Development: Stop Using UUIDs in Your Database | How UUIDs can Destroy Database Performance

Roberto Umbelino

Figma

Community Picks is a section on daily.dev where our community members share the most interesting and valuable content they've discovered online. From insightful articles to handy tools, every post is a gem curated by our dedicated coomunity. To contribute to Community Picks, you need to have at least 250 reputation points, ensuring that only active and trusted members can share their finds.

Community Picks

This post discusses the performance issues and storage impact of using UUIDs as keys in a database.

Stop Using UUIDs in Your Database

From the conclusion:
<blockquote>
UUIDs are a great way to ensure uniqueness between records in a table.
</blockquote>
And that’s precisely why people use them. Until you can provide a way to do that that doesn’t have the performance hit “at scale,” can we just stop writing the same article over and over?

It’s so shallow and stupid it impressed me

Remember guys, when shit hits the fun and you need to fix these broken incremental ID foreign keys during weekend you will be ready to sell your soul to devil for UUID solutions implemented at the very beginning

I don’t think any company would discard the use of UUIDs just because it takes a few millis more to operate or take few KBs more to store.
Remember, Security &gt; Slightly High Speed with low security.
Especially in these times, when DB providers have out of the box integrations for the UUIDs in the best optimized way!

The benefits of using UUID outweigh the disadvantages of using it.
also, some DBs already have UUID optimizations like Postgres which does have a <code>uuid</code> datatype.