GUIDs (was Re: SQL backend for GnuCash 2)

[Derek Atkins]

Phil Longstaff <plongstaff at rogers.com> writes:

>> I suppose we could use varchar; the guid has a fixed size so we know
>> exactly how much space it requires.  It's just an MD5 hash, so it's
>> 128 bits, which is 16 bytes of binary or 32 bytes of Hexstring.
>
> I am looking at having an int as the primary key for references to a
> table.  The GUID would be stored with the row as 4 ints (guid_1, guid_2,
> guid_3 and guid_4).  If we need to search a lot by GUID, we could have
> an index which spans those 4 columns.  I don't see there is a lot of
> need, though.

I still don't understand why you want to do this.  What does it buy
us?  It seems to add a LOT of complexity on the GnuCash side when
building up SQL queries.  Instead of just being able to print out
"$table.${object}_id='$guid'" we'd need a much more complicated SQL
generator routine.

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available