Beyond Randomness: A Detailed Study on UUID Standards, Data Integrity, and Identifier Design Across Storage Systems

Authors

Akash Rakesh Sinha

Abstract

Identifiers have become one of the most basic building blocks of modern computing, enabling references to data and entities across vast and disparate architectures. In this paper, we provide an insightful exploration of Universally Unique Identifiers (UUIDs), its historical background, variant types, and generation strategies. It also compares UUIDs against the other models of identification, outlining significant operational and architectural implications. We shed light on performance implications, collision probabilities, and balancing acts that must be drawn to ensure both scalability and data integrity by investigating UUID deployment across relational databases, NoSQL systems, and distributed file-storage platforms. Privacy, security, and compliance are touched on, especially with respect to time- based UUIDs and cryptographically strong random-number generators. Finally, it goes into some new trends such as monotonic UUID variants and decentralized identifiers and suggests some best practices for creating future-proof identifier schemes in an increasingly rich digital universe.

Keywords

UUID, Identifier Design, Data Storage, Key Generation, UUID Versions, Collision Probability, Performance Optimization, Privacy and Compliance, Distributed Systems, Monotonic IDs, ULID, KSUID, Microservices, NoSQL, Relational Databases

Beyond Randomness: A Detailed Study on UUID Standards, Data Integrity, and Identifier Design Across Storage Systems. Akash Rakesh Sinha. 2023. IJIRCT, Volume 9, Issue 5. Pages 1-7. https://www.ijirct.org/viewPaper.php?paperId=2503087