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230 points craigkerstiens | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.214s | source
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kingkilr ◴[] No.42576212[source]
I would strongly implore people not to follow the example this post suggests, and write code that relies on this monotonicity.

The reason for this is simple: the documentation doesn't promise this property. Moreover, even if it did, the RFC for UUIDv7 doesn't promise this property. If you decide to depend on it, you're setting yourself up for a bad time when PostgreSQL decides to change their implementation strategy, or you move to a different database.

Further, the stated motivations for this, to slightly simplify testing code, are massively under-motivating. Saving a single line of code can hardly be said to be worth it, but even if it were, this is a problem far better solved by simply writing a function that will both generate the objects and sort them.

As a profession, I strongly feel we need to do a better job orienting ourselves to the reality that our code has a tendency to live for a long time, and we need to optimize not for "how quickly can I type it", but "what will this code cost over its lifetime".

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3eb7988a1663 ◴[] No.42576251[source]
I too am missing the win on this. It is breaking the spec, and does not seem like it offers a significant advantage. In the eventual event where you have a collection of UUID7 you are only ever going to be able to rely on the millisecond precision anyway.
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1. throw0101c ◴[] No.42576582[source]
> It is breaking the spec […]

As per a sibling comment, it is not breaking the spec. The comment in the Pg code even cites the spec that says what to do (and is quoted in the post):

     * Generate UUID version 7 per RFC 9562, with the given timestamp.
     *
     * UUID version 7 consists of a Unix timestamp in milliseconds (48
     * bits) and 74 random bits, excluding the required version and
     * variant bits. To ensure monotonicity in scenarios of high-
     * frequency UUID generation, we employ the method "Replace
     * LeftmostRandom Bits with Increased Clock Precision (Method 3)",
     * described in the RFC. […]