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"Internal" is a blurry boundary, though - you pick integer sequence numbers and then years on an API gets bolted on to your purely internal database and now your system is vulnerable to enumeration attacks. Does a vendor system where you reference some of your internal data count as "internal"? Is UID 1 the system user that was originally used to provision the system? Better try and attack that one specifically... the list goes on.

UUIDs or other similarly randomized IDs are useful because they don't include any ordering information or imply anything about significance, which is a very safe default despite the performance hits.

There certainly are reasons to avoid them and the article we're commenting on names some good ones, at scale. But I'd argue that if you have those problems you likely have the resources and experience to mitigate the risks, and that true randomly-derived IDs are a safer default for most new systems if you don't have one of the very specific reasons to avoid them.





> "Internal" is a blurry boundary, though

Not for me :)

"Internal" means "not exposed outside the database" (that includes applications and any other external systems)


Internal means "not exposed outside some boundary". For most people, this boundary encompasses something larger than a single database, and this boundary can change.



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