The Geeks Guide to GUIDs series

Fabulous Adventures In Coding - GUID Guide, part one

What is a GUID? The acronym stands for "globally unique identifier"; GUIDs are also called UUIDs, which stands for "universally unique identifier". (It is unclear to me why we need two nigh-identical names for the same thing, but there you have it.) A GUID is essentially a 128 bit integer, and when written in its human-readable form, is written in hexadecimal in the pattern {xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx}.

The purpose of a GUID is, as the name implies, to uniquely identify something, so that we can refer to that thing by its identifier and have confidence that everyone can agree upon what thing we are referring to. Think about this problem as it applies to, say, books. It is cumbersome to refer to a book by quoting it in its entirety every time you mention it. Instead, we give every book an identifier in the form of its title. The problem with using a title as an identifier is that there may be many different books with the same title. I have three different books all entitled "The C# Programming Language" on my desk right now; if I want to refer to one of them in particular, I'd typically have to give the edition number. But there is nothing (apart from their good sense) stopping some entirely different publisher from also publishing a book called "The C# Programming Language, fourth edition" that differs from the others.

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Fabulous Adventures In Coding - GUID guide, part two

"So how is it that a GUID can be guaranteed to be unique without some sort of central authority that ensures uniqueness, a la the ISBN system?

Well, first off, notice that the number of possible GUIDs is vastly larger than the number of possible ISBNs. Because the last of the thirteen digits is a checksum, there are only 10¹² possible ISBNs. That is about a hundred unique ISBNs for every person on earth. That's almost exactly 2⁴⁰, so you could represent an ISBN by a 40 bit number (again, ignoring the checksum). There are 2¹²⁸ possible GUIDs; that's about 40 billion billion billion unique GUIDs for every person on earth. This alone gives us the intuition that it ought to be pretty easy to ensure that two of them never collide; there are a lot of GUIDs to choose from!

There are a number of possible strategies for making a unique GUID, and in fact information about the strategy used is encoded in the first four bits of the third "group"; almost every GUID you see will be of the form {xxxxxxxx-xxxx-1xxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx} or {xxxxxxxx-xxxx-4xxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx}.

If there is a one in that place then the algorithm used to guarantee uniqueness is essentially a variation on the ISBN strategy....

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We (Dev's, IT's, etc) know about GUID's but how much do we really know? Eric's posts look to fill our brains with just about everything we never (err... I mean ever... um.. yeah) wanted to know about GUIDs.