Glossary / UUID

UUID

Practical PostgreSQL glossary entry with a clear definition, example, and benchmarking context.

What Is UUID?

UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) is a 128-bit value used to uniquely identify records. PostgreSQL supports it via the uuid-ossp extension. It's often used as a primary key in distributed systems.

Why It Matters for PostgreSQL Performance

In PostgreSQL performance work, UUID affects throughput, latency, or operational reliability depending on workload and configuration.

Practical Benchmarking Context

When benchmarking with pgbench, track how UUID changes behavior across scale factor, client concurrency, and storage conditions.

Use this term together with workload shape, concurrency level, and scale factor when interpreting pgbench outputs. Isolated values can be misleading without full run context.

Example

Generate: SELECT uuid_generate_v4();

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