Thomas Steinmaurer schrieb am 20.03.2011 um 19:54 (+0100):

> If you aren't in need for having a unique identifier
> across an entire system, e.g. for replication, I wouldn't
> care about GUIDs. IMHO integers are more easier to read
> and query in case you want to lookup a record.

I agree. Here's a little GUID abuse story. At my previous
employer, a place where they manufacture a software called
d.vinci, things were set up so that the nice two character
ISO 639-1 language identifiers - de, fr, en, etc - had, for
what reasons I do not know, probably just ignorance - fallen
in disgrace and been replaced by whompy 128 bit GUIDs, as if
someone was fearing a giga-babylonian linguistic explosion,
which the app had to be prepared for. So the devs at that
place had actually memorized what the various GUIDs stood
for - I have to add that the most important language GUIDs
(due to a quirk in the version of MS SQL Server they had
seen the light of the world in) differed in only two of the
32 characters making up that unreadable hex string. The fun
thing is those GUIDs leaked everywhere, into all tables,
each and every copy of the code base (their way of scaling
to multiple customers), right down into data export, web
services, and the HTML, as can be observed on public pages
like this ("Sprache Karriereportal"):

https://nordex-jobs.dvinci.de/cgi-bin/appl/selfservice.pl?action=newuserform

:-)

--
Michael Ludwig