Are there any downsides to using nanoid for primary key?
Apr 23
I know that UUIDs and incrementing integers are often used for primary keys. I'm thinking of nanoids instead because those are URL friendly without being guessable / brute-force scrapeable (like incrementing integers).
Would there be any reason not to use nanoids as primary keys in a database like Postgres? (For example: Maybe they drastically increase query time since they aren't ... aligned or something?)
postgresql1 answer
Accepted answer · original discussion
May 24
Most databases use incrementing id's because it's more efficient to insert a new value onto the end of a B-tree based index.
If you insert a new value into a random place in the middle of a B-tree, it may have to split the B-tree nonterminal node, and that could cause the node at the next higher level to split, and so on up to the top of the B-tree.
This also has a greater risk of causing fragmentation, which means the index takes more space for the same number of values.
Read https://www.percona.com/blog/2015/04/03/illustrating-primary-key-models-in-innodb-and-their-impact-on-disk-usage/ for a great visualization about the tradeoff between using an auto-increment versus UUID in a primary key.
That blog is about MySQL, but the same issue applies to any B-tree based data structure.
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