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tkejsertoday at 11:43 AM0 repliesview on HN

@da_chicken: You can read more about Snowflake ID in the Wiki page linked in the article.

The short story:

They are bit like UUID in that you can generate them across a system in a distributed way without coordination. Unlike UUID they are only 64-bit.

The first bits of the snowflake ID are structured in such a way that the values end up roughly sequentially ordered on disk. That makes them great for large tables where you need to locate specific values (such a those that store query information).