Creating IDs for uniqueness and URL referentiality

Question

I need to create objects and make them available on the web. Similarly to stackoverflow, I have something like. ``` http://stackoverflow.com/users/78374 ``` However, in my case the ID of the object I create must be unique, so I am thinking about a UUID, leading to a URL like ``` http://example.com/users/{8e931066-7d87-4f2b-a3b5-608c4c9a9083} ``` because later on I will have to merge different databases together, and I don't want to have merging issues. Is this an accepted practice? What are the alternatives?

Accepted Answer

If it's just a question of merging databases, giving each db a unique identifier and then combining that with the auto-increment PK would give unique ids for every object you could use and not worry about merging issues.

Creating IDs for uniqueness and URL referentiality

Solution

Problem