How many values can a UUID v4 take?
How many do you have to generate before a collision becomes a remote possibility?
replies(5):
The heuristic commonly used for things that matter (e.g. high-security/high-assurance systems) is that the probability of collision should be less than 2^-32 assuming uniform distribution[0]. From this you can compute that the largest set of keys that can be used with UUIDv4 that satisfies this constraint is roughly 100 trillion.
This is a pretty high limit that will work for most applications. Some large data models can exceed this number of records, so you can't use probabilistic UUID naively in these cases e.g. one for every unique record. In data models that approach the 100T limit, UUID-like identifiers are typically generated deterministically to avoid this issue entirely.
[0] There have been many cases of UUIDv4 systems breaking in the wild because people naively or accidentally use weak entropy sources. This turns out to be a recurring footgun such that use of UUIDv4 is prohibited in some applications because you can't rely on people to implement it properly.