Home/ Questions/Q 151893
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-11T09:31:34+00:00

I have an Oracle project that would be a good fit for using GUIDs

  • 0

I have an Oracle project that would be a good fit for using GUIDs as a key. I found the following snippet

SET SERVEROUTPUT ON BEGIN FOR indx IN 1 .. 5 LOOP DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line ( SYS_GUID ); END LOOP; END; /

From http://feuerthoughts.blogspot.com/2006/02/watch-out-for-sequential-oracle-guids.html

When I run it against my database (I tried it on versions 10g and version 11) I get output like

64FE4083D6BA7CB4E0400F0A0E0A18B0 64FE4083D6BB7CB4E0400F0A0E0A18B0 64FE4083D6BC7CB4E0400F0A0E0A18B0 64FE4083D6BD7CB4E0400F0A0E0A18B0 64FE4083D6BE7CB4E0400F0A0E0A18B0

I.e. the value never changes! Is there something I have to do to set this up to work as expected?

Edit: I am not very observant – the GUIDs are changing, but it looks like I am suffering from the sequential GUID problem that the link above is talking about.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Seems OK. From the description:

    SYS_GUID generates and returns a globally unique identifier (RAW value) made up of 16 bytes. On most platforms, the generated identifier consists of a host identifier, a process or thread identifier of the process or thread invoking the function, and a nonrepeating value (sequence of bytes) for that process or thread.

    From your example:

     64FE4083D6BA7CB4E0400F0A0E0A18B0 64FE4083D6BB7CB4E0400F0A0E0A18B0 64FE4083D6BC7CB4E0400F0A0E0A18B0 64FE4083D6BD7CB4E0400F0A0E0A18B0 64FE4083D6BE7CB4E0400F0A0E0A18B0

    Nobody mentioned anything about the distribution of these GUID values. They should be nonrepeating and they are. Unless you get exactly the same output every time.

    • 0