On May 28, 3:28 am, Bob Melson <[email protected]> wrote: > To start, I don't want to re-ignite the previous discussion regarding *IDs, > aside from saying that it seems to me that a {Globally|Universally} Unique > ID should indeed be unique everywhere; given the identical input even on > different machines; the resulting ID should, or so it seems to me, be > identical but unique to that input. No. A UUID (or GUID if you prefer) is a specific piece of existing technology. It is not a generic term that can be redefined at will. It may or may not have been given the best name, but we're stuck with the name now. We can argue all day about whether the phrase "universally unique" carries the expectation that given the same input, it will produce the same ID. But the standards defining UUIDs are quite specific: the sole guarantee that it provides is that every time you generate a new UUID, it will be different, even if the input is the same. For some applications that's useful; for others that may not be what you want, and if so, a UUID is probably the wrong piece technology to use. Richard