[TYPO3-core] Universally/Globally Unique IDentifier in core in 6.0?

[Jigal van Hemert]

Hi,

On 23-7-2012 15:13, JoH asenau wrote:
> IMHO there is a huge difference between just having uid support in TYPO3
> and switching the whole normalization system from INT uid to NON INT uuid.

True. We encounter a lot of problems which are caused by non-unique 
identifiers of records (deployment, import/export, references in 
configuration, etc.)

> Especially performance will be a problem, since most of the TYPO3
> installations are based on MySQL which does not perform too well with
> non-numerical-indexing.

I have never found such problems in relatively small tables (TYPO3 
tables are usually not large for any database, except some log tables). 
It might occur with very long key values, but UUIDs are not extremely long.

> IMHO there is no need to replace the current behaviour completely.
> Instead we should provide UUID support as additional feature that can be
> enabled/used on demand. Especially export and reimport of records and
> cross domain sharing of content will be uses cases for that, but as long
> as there is no need for these special features the rest of the TYPO3
> world could stay with the usual normalization and have less problems.

The problem with importing records is that (numerical) uid collisions 
occur. This can be solved to an extend (as import/export does), but 
references to these records (singleViewPid in TS for example) need to be 
adjusted. With UUIDs this would be no problem.

The case of the BE layouts provided by an extension (see other thread).

Moving content/configuration in a dev/test/accept/production street 
would be easy.

It's easy to come up with a long list of situations where a globally 
unique identifier would come in very handy. I don't see how an extra 
UUID would be a solution here if the numerical, not-so-unique uid is 
still the primary ID.

-- 
Jigal van Hemert
TYPO3 Core Team member

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