When are you truly forced to use UUID as part of the design?

Question

I don\'t really see the point of UUID. I know the probability of a collision is effectively nil, but effectively nil is not even close to impossible.

Answer 1

If you just look at the alternatives e.g. for a simple database application, to have to query the database every time before you create a new object, you will soon find that using UUID can effectively reduce to complexity of your system. Granted - if you use int keys the are 32bit, which will store in a quarter of the 128bit UUID. Granted - UUID generation algorithms take up more computational power than simply incrementing a number. But - who cares? The overhead of managing an "authority" to assign otherwise unique numbers easily outweighs that by orders of magnitude, depending on your intended uniqueness ID space.