How short can a GUID be?
I know the standard GUIDs. Can they be made shorter? What is the theory behind it? Greg Dean's answer is correct but in order to understand how a GUID is generated and why it ought not to be shortened I would highly suggest you read the article below. The Old New Thing : GUIDs are globally unique, but substrings of GUIDs aren't : A customer needed to generate an 8-byte unique value, and their initial idea was to generate a GUID and throw away the second half, keeping the first eight bytes. They wanted to know if this was a good idea. No, it's not a good idea. The GUID generation algorithm