UUIDs are great for this. It’s really just a random 128-bit integer, which makes comparisons about as fast as variable-length integers on modern hardware. And they decode to strings which means no application code or API end-user code is going to assume it’s a number.
Absolutely agreed on all points. I like UUIDs. There is still a surprising number of data processing systems which don't have support for 128 bit integers. This makes me sad.
