Efficient Use of GUIDs

Author

Lutteroth, Christof ; Weber, Gerald

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci., Univ. of Auckland, Auckland

fYear

2008

fDate

1-4 Dec. 2008

Firstpage

115

Lastpage

120

Abstract

GUIDs are globally unique identifiers that can be generated independently. They play an important role in many distributed systems. However, compared to most local identifiers, they are relatively large (16 bytes). We discuss techniques that can make the use of GUIDs more efficient, so that they become more viable as a ubiquitous solution for large distributed databases and similar applications relying on artificial identifiers. The proposed techniques include canonical GUIDs for primitive values and a compression scheme for timestamp-based GUIDs. The techniques have been implemented and can be used in different programming languages. Furthermore, general aspects and potential problems of GUIDs as defined in the RFC 4122 are discussed.

Keywords

distributed databases; ubiquitous computing; RFC 4122; compression scheme; distributed databases; timestamp-based GUID; ubiquitous solution; Application software; Computer languages; Computer science; Distributed computing; Distributed databases; Encoding; Relational databases; Scalability; Software systems; Testing; GUID; GUIDization; RFC 4122; compression;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Parallel and Distributed Computing, Applications and Technologies, 2008. PDCAT 2008. Ninth International Conference on

Conference_Location

Otago

Print_ISBN

978-0-7695-3443-5

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/PDCAT.2008.67

Filename

4710970