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Why You Must Use Unique Identifier Data Type in Your Primary Key Field?

Why You Must Use Unique Identifier Data Type in Your Primary Key Field?

Database design can affect the entire project’s status critic level. If the complexity of the database-side operations is complicated, the complexity of database-level design and choice of complex queries is likely to be big time cost in the future.
When software developers develop projects in by herself/himself or as a team, the way they usually follow is two-fold. They follow established rules that are already in place/project as a team member but this happens when they are in an existing project. The whole database and architecture design follows the habits they have when they are up to herself/himself.
Developers change their habits in software-side very quickly and always try to find the best, however developers can be quite conservative in database phase. It is not so easy to make changes to database design because it will affect the way that get used to develop. That’s why today I will blog about why we need to use unique identifier data type in the database in the primary key field. This may seem very rubbish or small issue, but it is the base of database and it will save and protect you more thing you can imagine.

Advantages:

• Multitenancy
We use a mutually-tenant structure/design in our applications and products such as Sign&Go professional email signature tool, the easy sms password reset solution Passgate we developed in PeakUp. Even in scenarios where multiple applications or databases are running separately in Azure or AWS, it becomes almost impossible to follow along with the integer data typed records in the process of separating applications from each other in the database where only logs are kept. Another scenario you can also see is that you can think of a resource scenario in multilingual applications that are stored in a single database. It is always easier to set up and track resource records based on unique identifier, even if you have key-value traversal in the resource.

• Security
In a bad security breach scenario with SQL injection, attackers will find it more difficult to exploit weaknesses, as they are quite relaxed at the expiration of the grant by following the numbers 1,2,3 in the id column. It provides a lot of confidence in the way that user-side recordings are prevented from being intercepted by the web address.
Besides, using GUID will be extra helpful if you are exporting your data via web api and want to provide a standard.

Disadvantages:

• Performance
Since the GUID data type has a 4-byte index value, some problems may be encountered if you are not careful in sort operations and join. In addition, you will need the “Created “ field in the process of ordering old or new records, which will actually bring you a more reportable data structure.

• Easy Readability and Registration Test
Testing the data coming to the database or giving a lot of confusion in direct SQL queries can slow down or make it harder because of the size and difficulty of memorizing.