Any comments on using GUID's?

Hello all,

I've seen a few posts about Oracle's SYS_GUID function to generate globally unique identifiers (GUID's) and wanted to get some more feedback from the Oracle community.

Is SYS_GUID widely used? Does anyone have any advice on using GUID's, especially if you want to develop an app that works across various databases (Oracle SQL Server, DB2). Can you define your keys as varchar(32) instead of raw(32)?

As a DBA, I admit I have a bias toward human-readable key-values, i.e. "13", rather than "13F0664925D24C00B0177BF1793A83BB". The main downside (aside from more typing in SQL statements for the occasional fix and ad-hoc query) seems that the ID's are no longer monotonically increasing, i.e. you can't use the ID to determine the sequence in which records were created. Perhaps I'm wrong here, however.

thanks,

bill milbratz
chicago il usa Received on Tue Jul 24 2001 - 17:42:03 CEST