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Ticket Servers: Distributed Unique Primary Keys on the Cheap

Given the need for globally unique ids the obvious question is, why not use GUIDs? Mostly because GUIDs are big, and they index badly in MySQL. One of the ways we keep MySQL fast is we index everything we want to query on, and we only query on indexes. So index size is a key consideration. If you can’t keep your indexes in memory, you can’t keep your database fast.