[libdb-develop] Hashes or Auto Increment IDs?

[Morbus I. <mo...@di...>]

In a lot of the tables within LibDB, I use a 20 character alphanumeric ID 
to uniquely identify an item. One of the prime reasons for this was to 
create unique URLs, something like:

    /person/129387123kj1h23/
    /expression/129387123987/
    /concept/1237192387193/

and so forth. Going to that URL would give you information about the data 
being described, as you'd expect. I've been using these 20chars on
everything that I felt people would want to look at: a list of
identifiers ("create a list based on Artisan's cataloging ID"),
people, etc., etc.

I've NOT been using 20chars when it came to, what I felt, were
database only associations, namely the relationships. The 23rd
relationship would have id#23 and so forth.

So, here's the question: should I use 20chars on everything? What
if, programmatically, a script needed to have a relationship (and
only one relationship) described in XML or SQL or whatever else?

    /relationship/1237192387193/sql
    /relationship/1237192387193/mods
    /relationship/1237192387193/n3

Would that ever be useful to people? Would that ever be useful to
programming or a web service? Should I just bite the bullet now
and use char20's for every table in the database?

Thoughts appreciated.




-- 
Morbus Iff ( i put the demon back in codemonkey )
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