Question

If you look at facebook’s graph API, it seems as though all objects share the same ID space, and all Ids are unique even if they are in different tables.

Is there a feature in MySQL that handles this? (if not, high level idea of how to implement?)

Answer 1

You may want to check out UUID(). It returns a globally unique ID so your IDs will never clash.

To convert it to integer format, you can

UNHEX(REPLACE(UUID(),'-',''))

for storing in a BINARY(16) column.

(Source for converting to integer: Nicholas Sherlock’s comment at MySQL reference)