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Asked: 2026-05-11T11:58:45+00:00

First, I’m aware of this question , and the suggestion (using GUID) doesn’t apply

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First, I’m aware of this question, and the suggestion (using GUID) doesn’t apply in my situation.

I want simple UIDs so that my users can easily communicate this information over the phone :

Hello, I’ve got a problem with order 1584

as opposed to

hello, I’ve got a problem with order 4daz33-d4gerz384867-8234878-14

I want those to be unique (database wide) because I have a few different kind of ‘objects’ … there are order IDs, and delivery IDs, and billing-IDs and since there’s no one-to-one relationship between those, I have no way to guess what kind of object an ID is referring to.

With database-wide unique IDs, I can immediately tell what object my customer is referring to. My user can just input an ID in a search tool, and I save him the extra-click to further refine what is looking for.

My current idea is to use identity columns with different seeds 1, 2, 3, etc, and an increment value of 100.

This raises a few question though :

  • What if I eventually get more than 100 object types? granted I could use 1000 or 10000, but something that doesn’t scale well ‘smells’

  • Is there a possibility the seed is ‘lost’ (during a replication, a database problem, etc?)

  • more generally, are there other issues I should be aware of?

  • is it possible to use an non integer (I currently use bigints) as an identity columns, so that I can prefix the ID with something representing the object type? (for example a varchar column)

  • would it be a good idea to user a ‘master table’ containing only an identity column, and maybe the object type, so that I can just insert a row in it whenever a need a new idea. I feel like it might be a bit overkill, and I’m afraid it would complexify all my insertion requests. Plus the fact that I won’t be able to determine an object type without looking at the database

  • are there other clever ways to address my problem?

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  1. Why not use identities on all the tables, but any time you present it to the user, simply tack on a single char for the type? e.g. O1234 is an order, D123213 is a delivery, etc.? That way you don’t have to engineer some crazy scheme…

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