Can an “SEO Friendly” url contain a unique ID?

Question

I\'d like to start using \"SEO Friendly Urls\" but the notion of generating and looking up large, unique text \"ids\" seems to be a significant performance challenge relative to

Answer 1

Nothing wrong with that. An increasing number of services have started to use a hybrid solution as Paul Tomblin already pointed out. In addition to SO, Tumblr uses this pattern too (maybe it was the first).

Furthermore, in certain services—like Google News—the URL must contain a unique numeric ID.