How to generate 8 bytes unique id from GUID?

Question

I try to use long as unique id within our C# application (not global, and only for one session) for our events. Do you know if the following will generate an unique long id?

public long GenerateId()
{
 byte[] buffer = Guid.NewGuid().ToByteArray();
 return BitConverter.ToInt64(buffer, 0);
}

Why we not use GUID directly? We think 8 bytes long is good enough.

Answer 1

You cannot distill a 16-bit value down to an 8-bit value while still retaining the same degree of uniqueness. If uniqueness is critical, don't "roll your own" anything. Stick with GUIDs unless you really know what you're doing.

If a relatively naive implementation of uniqueness is sufficient then it's still better to generate your own IDs rather than derive them from GUIDs. The following code snippet is extracted from a "Locally Unique Identifier" class I find myself using fairly often. It makes it easy to define both the length and the range of characters output.

using System.Security.Cryptography;
using System.Text;

public class LUID
{
    private static readonly RNGCryptoServiceProvider RandomGenerator = new RNGCryptoServiceProvider();
    private static readonly char[] ValidCharacters = "ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZ23456789".ToCharArray();
    public const int DefaultLength = 6;
    private static int counter = 0;

    public static string Generate(int length = DefaultLength)
    {
        var randomData = new byte[length];
        RandomGenerator.GetNonZeroBytes(randomData);

        var result = new StringBuilder(DefaultLength);
        foreach (var value in randomData)
        {
            counter = (counter + value) % (ValidCharacters.Length - 1);
            result.Append(ValidCharacters[counter]);
        }
        return result.ToString();
    }
}

In this instance it excludes 1 (one), I (i), 0 (zero) and O (o) for the sake of unambiguous human-readable output.

To determine just how effectively 'unique' your particular combination of valid characters and ID length are, the math is simple enough but it's still nice to have a 'code proof' of sorts (Xunit):

    [Fact]
    public void Does_not_generate_collisions_within_reasonable_number_of_iterations()
    {
        var ids = new HashSet<string>();
        var minimumAcceptibleIterations = 10000;
        for (int i = 0; i < minimumAcceptibleIterations; i++)
        {
            var result = LUID.Generate();
            Assert.True(!ids.Contains(result), $"Collision on run {i} with ID '{result}'");
            ids.Add(result);
        }            
    }