IDs

Picking the right ID system is hard.

I am thinking of picking ULID but I don't want to expose timestamps. Which means I need a public_id. And most public_id methods that create the id from the internal one are not secure.

But I can also just generate a random integer and use that as the public_id.

cus_34810471058 for customer 34810471058.

This also increases productivity for people working with ids to debug things.

More info on ids here: https://adileo.github.io/awesome-identifiers/ (opens in a new tab)

uuid v7 seems better simply because there is no need to have a machine and a shard id. And the RFC just came out: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9562.html (opens in a new tab)

I will probably go for uuid v7 everywhere except the workspace, for the workspace I will pick uuid. Because for the workspace I don't want to have to deal with a public id, since I shard by workspace_public_id.

workspace: private id: uuidv4 public id: the uuidv4 in base62

other tables: private id: uuidv7 public id: hash-id -> collisions are more likely but it's fine because these tables are within a workspace.

More resources for you to read: https://dev.to/stripe/designing-apis-for-humans-object-ids-3o5a/comments (opens in a new tab)

It's important to note that stripe obviously doesn't use their public ids as the primary key.

notes:

1. whatever id I pick, I need to bake in a system for easy redirects. This happened in my previous company and we wasted a lot of engineering time to build the proper solution. THis is also very important for CMS: you need to let users change the slug.

2. Apparently Stripe uses the public key to find the right shard. Very interesting. I was wondering how I would do this with my workspaces.

loved this article from Clerk: https://clerk.com/blog/generating-sortable-stripe-like-ids-with-segment-ksuids (opens in a new tab)

But it's also confusing: it looks like they use this public id as the primary id.