twitter/snowflake — Issue #7: A quick question about new IDs.
Author: tarnfeld
Created: 2012-03-02 07:38:49+00:00
State: open

Hey. Trying not to sound too much like a noob here but..

I'm going to assume this isn't incremental, from near 0, since its based on time, right? I'm interested in using this to generate IDs I can insert into Amazon DynamoDB for primary keys, and to generate a short URL. Currently my method of generating the short url (The suffix) will expand the number of characters used in the string as the numbers passed in get higher, my worry is since Snowflake is always returning 64 bit ids, will the numbers always be 10765432100123456789 this long, or will that start of smaller?

I appreciate any reply to this, I know this isn't the right place but was hopping someone might be able to explain ;-)

Thanks.