.NET Short Unique Identifier

Question

I need a unique identifier in .NET (cannot use GUID as it is too long for this case).

Do people think that the algorithm used here is a good candidate or do you have

Answer 1

In C# a long value has 64 bits, which if encoded with Base64, there will be 12 characters, including 1 padding =. If we trim the padding =, there will be 11 characters.

One crazy idea here is we could use a combination of Unix Epoch and a counter for one epoch value to form a long value. The Unix Epoch in C# DateTimeOffset.ToUnixEpochMilliseconds is in long format, but the first 2 bytes of the 8 bytes are always 0, because otherwise the date time value will be greater than the maximum date time value. So that gives us 2 bytes to place an ushort counter in.

So, in total, as long as the number of ID generation does not exceed 65536 per millisecond, we can have an unique ID:

// This is the counter for current epoch. Counter should reset in next millisecond
ushort currentCounter = 123;

var epoch = DateTimeOffset.UtcNow.ToUnixTimeMilliseconds();
// Because epoch is 64bit long, so we should have 8 bytes
var epochBytes = BitConverter.GetBytes(epoch);
if (BitConverter.IsLittleEndian)
{
    // Use big endian
    epochBytes = epochBytes.Reverse().ToArray();
}

// The first two bytes are always 0, because if not, the DateTime.UtcNow is greater 
// than DateTime.Max, which is not possible
var counterBytes = BitConverter.GetBytes(currentCounter);
if (BitConverter.IsLittleEndian)
{
    // Use big endian
    counterBytes = counterBytes.Reverse().ToArray();
}

// Copy counter bytes to the first 2 bytes of the epoch bytes
Array.Copy(counterBytes, 0, epochBytes, 0, 2);

// Encode the byte array and trim padding '='
// e.g. AAsBcTCCVlg
var shortUid = Convert.ToBase64String(epochBytes).TrimEnd('=');