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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-03T20:23:17+00:00

I’m designing a database for a project of mine, and in the project I

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I’m designing a database for a project of mine, and in the project I have many different kinds of objects.
Every object might have comments on it – which it pulls from the same comments table.

I noticed I might run into problems when two different kind of objects have the same id, and when pulling from the comments table they will pull each other comments.
I could just solve it by adding an object_type column, but it will be harder to maintain when querying, etc.

What is the best approach to have unique row IDs across my whole database?

I noticed Facebook number their objects with a really, really large number IDs, and probably determine the type of it by id mod trillion or some other really big number.
Though that might work, are there any more options to achieve the same thing, or relying on big enough number ranges should be fine?

Thanks!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You could use something like what Twitter uses for their unique IDs.

    http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/06/announcing-snowflake.html

    For every object you create, you will have to make some sort of API call to this service, though.

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