UUID

Definitions

1. Universally Unique Identifier — a 128-bit value formatted as five groups of hexadecimal digits (e.g., 550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000) designed to be globally unique without a central authority. Version 4 uses random bits; version 7 (RFC 9562) embeds a timestamp for better database index locality.

   In plain English: A long random-looking code used to give every record a unique name, even across different computers that aren't talking to each other.

   Example: "We switched from auto-increment IDs to UUIDv7 so we can generate IDs on any node without coordination and still get sorted insert order."

Related Terms

• index
• foreign key
• ACID
• Join
• Partition
• Replica
• Shared Nothing Architecture
• CockroachDB
• Context Propagation