In response to some recent discussion here and on X about a company having an in house uuid microservice and team dedicated to it. At first that was made fun of, but further discussion revealed in fact sometimes uuids can collide due to improper entropy seeding most likely. In order to ensure that UUIDs are unique, we store each generation in a database, then check new generations against it to ensure they are not previously generated. As well, there is an API through which you can check if a UUID is present in the database. Paid options available for heavy use. Enjoy!

I wonder what the benefit of UUIDs over a counter is? A counter would not require a db and still never collide.

Hi author, could you please share more details about the UUID collision, how it occurred in micro service etc..

And please also share why not just use e.g. 256-bit UUIDs instead of v4 128-bit if collisions really are a problem with 128-bit (which i find hard to belive).

this is a joke right?