> 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 in disgrace and been replaced by whompy 128 bit GUIDs, as if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
>
> :-)

Or: Ever tried to lookup a record via a GUID by phone? That's fun. ;-)

Seriously. They have pros, but I would avoid them as record identifiers
whenever I can. ;-)



--
With regards,

Thomas Steinmaurer
Upscene Productions
http://www.upscene.com
http://blog.upscene.com/thomas/

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