this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
65 points (100.0% liked)
TechTakes
1401 readers
148 users here now
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You also definitely shouldn't be using String non-monotonic UUIDs for primary keys in a database, like, literally ever, but what the fuck do I know, I just do databases for a living, I'm not the all-knowing GPT code wizard.
UUIDs make great primary keys in some applications. If you generated 100 trillion UUID4s, there’s about a 1 in a billion chance of finding a duplicate. Thats usually good enough for my databases.
The issue here was that they used a single UUID instead of generating a new one for each record.
There are countless issues here. They didn't do exception handling, they used a string to store their UUIDs (even if this was a DB constraint, you use
sqlalchemy.Uuidand let the ORM and DB handle the translation), and as the person you're replying to stressed, they're using non-monotonic UUIDs. Also if you have a uniqueuser_idand you're never exposing your primary keys, you don't need to get fancy, just let the ORM handle it with auto-incrementing, for most use cases. And so many other tragic things about this one tiny blog post.tl;dr if you're going to copy code you don't understand, copy it from the docs, not from everything in the kitchen thrown into a blender.