UUID: Coordination-Free Unique Keys and Why They are Useful

QuestDB is an open-source time-series database designed for high-performance tasks such as those encountered on trading floors or in mission control, offering low latency and high ingestion throughput. It supports multiple database instances and the exchange of data across these instances, facilitating applications like IoT systems with globally deployed sensors. The text discusses the challenges of creating unique IDs for sensor data collection and explores several strategies, including the use of UUIDs (Universally Unique Identifiers) which are 128-bit values generated without the need for coordination, ensuring global uniqueness. UUIDs are advantageous as they occupy less space and optimize database operations compared to storing them as strings, which not only saves disk space but also enhances query performance. QuestDB has implemented UUIDs as a first-class data type to improve query efficiency and reduce storage costs, demonstrating a significant performance boost in data retrieval speed when using UUIDs instead of strings. The text further highlights the benefits of using UUIDs for distributed applications and suggests that future QuestDB versions will enhance UUID performance through vectorization and SIMD instructions.