How to generate UUID sequentially so that difference between two consecutive uuids would be 1?

Question

I am working on cursor based pagination and need a unique column which is sequential, so it would give proper fetch result. I know this can be solved by setting column as auto_increment with datatype bigint but eventually it will hit the limit of it which is 9223372036854775807.

So I am thinking like generating a sequential UUID like below which has compareTo result is 1.

cf3ea0ca-282d-11ec-9624-a71256fa1790

cf3ea0cb-282d-11ec-9624-410ea2fdd62c

cf3ea0cc-282d-11ec-9624-3b1a2da8c7d0

cf3ea0cd-282d-11ec-9624-877d8646d279

I generated these UUIDs using https://github.com/cowtowncoder/java-uuid-generator library

UUID uuid = Generators.timeBasedGenerator().generate();

This is how UUID can be generated, but it is not giving consistent results.

It there any other way to generate UUID which is sequential in ascending order.

Answer 1

You asked:

How to generate UUID sequentially so that difference between two consecutive uuids would be 1?

No, you cannot generate consecutive UUID values.

👉 You’ve misunderstood the goal of a universally unique identifier (UUID).

A UUID is an identifier that can be generated without needing to coordinate through a central authority. So that rules out a sequence such as 1, 2, 3, ….

UUIDs are intended to be (a) virtually unique, and (b) arbitrary in value. The next UUID in a procession is not predictable.

Even the type of content in a UUID may vary, with several versions of UUIDs having been defined, and some new ones proposed. One version representing a point in space and time, another version is nearly entirely random, and still others may be generated using other means. But all are valid UUIDs and can be used together.

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Work is underway on new Versions 6, 7, and 8 UUIDs. In this not-yet-finished specification draft, the bits of the UUID are rearranged to make the date portion sort chronologically. This natural ordering will make indexing in databases more efficient.