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Sequence numbers don't scale to distributed databases and distributed data creation though.

"Handful" is wrong. Any major system will start to run into this as soon as you start saying the word "scale" in design meetings.

UUIDs can also provide room for encoding other information, like the type of the object, where it was created, etc, since MAC address is often integrated in the UUID.




“Handful” is referring to cases where “your sequence generator can't number their order line items fast enough” is true. And I stand by that.

And if you want “other information”, good database design would put that other information in a column of its own.

Distributed databases have their place. But the tradeoffs they bring are often not worth it for your 1.0/MVP app.




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