[dev] What should we do about GUIDs changing?

[Jason M. Felice]

On Thu, Feb 26, 2004 at 10:44:46PM -0600, Marcus I. Ryan wrote:
> GUID is actually globally unique identifier.  I'd be inclined to move 
> (back?)
> to a more globally unique identfier so it will be unique not only on our
> system but on anyone else's system as well.

I prefer GUIDs to sequences in databases, as 1) sequences have concurrency
issues which are a performance penalty under heavy load 2) sequences
don't work in a disconnected or remote synchronization-type scenario.

Both are the sort of problems that you rarely encounter, but when you do
it's a big deal to retrofit code.  I've already had requests for
disconnected operation of a contact manager, where turba would otherwise
be acceptable.  I had to recommend another solution (true, it was
because of the problems with installing Apache/PHP/Horde/turba on a
Windows laptop, but hey).

Another project we'll be working on needs an online web interface and a
CD-based GUI interface.  I was going to write a Horde app and use
PHP-GTK+ to make the GUI version, but it would need to use GUIDs of some
sort there as well.

-- 
 Jason M. Felice
 Cronosys, LLC <http://www.cronosys.com/>