Gid

Gid is a small library for generating short globally unique, sortable uri safe identifiers.

Features

• Generated ids are sortable
• Generated ids carry creation time expressed in microseconds
• Generated ids are globally unique
• Minimal footprint
• High performance

Installation

With pip,

pip install gid

or through poetry

poetry add gid

Example ids

ShmX2HaaUB9UQL02 
ShmX2JGvSk4ZyZ13 
ShmX2Ku8mDizRc23 
ShmX2MWQVL5J7022 
ShmX2OCegs4MdP22 
ShmX2Pu2MDVFHa02 
ShmX2RYngGET4Z32 
ShmX2TCM6v701q23 
ShmX2UrBjxNGYM11

Usage

Generating id

from gid import Guid

some_id = Guid()
some_id.timestamp # contains timestamp expressed in milliseconds
str(some_id) # can be cast to a string

Recreating id from string

from gid import Guid
my_id = Guid()

same_id = Guid(str(my_id))

assert same_id == my_id
assert same_id.timestamp == my_id.timestamp

Id structure

Generated identifiers are case-sensitive, which means string functions (like lowercase or uppercase) on generated identifiers may break it because Sbt5LrD9iSAwb300 is not the same value as Sbt5LrD9iSAwB300.

The below diagram represents single identifier's structure, which is 16-character long:

    Sbt5LrD9iSAwb300
    |      |      |
    +- first 7 characters for millisecond timestamp
           |      |
           +- next 7 characters is randomly generated hash
                  |
                  + last two characters to ensure uniqueness of guid in a single millisecond

Within 1 ms there can be (62^2 - 620) unique generated ids on a single machine.