Generate Universally Unique 'Lexicographically' 'Sortable'
Identifiers
Description
Universally unique identifiers ('UUIDs') can be sub-optimal for many
uses-cases because they are not the most character efficient way of encoding
128 bits of randomness; v1/v2 versions are impractical in many environments,
as they require access to a unique, stable MAC address; v3/v5 versions require
a unique seed and produce randomly distributed IDs, which can cause fragmentation
in many data structures; v4 provides no other information than randomness which
can cause fragmentation in many data structures. Providing an alternative, 'ULIDs'
() have 128-bit compatibility with 'UUID', 1.21e+24
unique 'ULIDs' per millisecond, support standard (text) sorting, canonically encoded
as a 26 character string, as opposed to the 36 character 'UUID', use 'base32'
encoding for better efficiency and readability (5 bits per character), are case
insensitive, have no special characters (i.e. are 'URL' safe) and have a monotonic
sort order (correctly detects and handles the same millisecond).