Comment by paxys
2 years ago
What if I have multiple partitions? Replication? What if I don't want business data to be exposed due to strictly incremental counters? What if I want unique IDs across different tables?
2 years ago
What if I have multiple partitions? Replication? What if I don't want business data to be exposed due to strictly incremental counters? What if I want unique IDs across different tables?
Partitions should not impact the use of an INT PK, except that you’ll need to include the partition key in the PK, e.g. (id, created_at) if partitioning by datetime. The displayed ordering without an explicit ORDER BY may not make sense, but to be fair, there are never any guarantees about implicit order.
Replication should be fine, unless you mean active-active in which case I suggest a. not doing that b. using interleaved chunks, or a coordinator node that hands them out.
Business data exposure can be avoided (if it’s actually a problem, and not just a theoretical one) in a variety of ways; two of the most common are:
* Don’t use the id in the slug.
* Have a iid column that’s random and exposed, while keeping the integer as the PK.
If you need unique IDs across tables, then I question your use of an RDBMS, because you aren’t really making use of the relational aspect.
I could not have said it better myself. I would also add that I keep the slug just as an entirely separate column (or "user visible id") that they can change, had too many systems do things like "invoice id is auto generated" and then a customer coming back and saying "the invoice id has to be this or the auditors will scream!" - don't expose internals of your database to your users and you wont have a bad time.