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It would be nice for these comparisons to also include 'int64' so people can see how much of an overhead UUID's are compared to the traditional approach.


The problem here is that auto increment ints are guessable.

The size of that problem depends on your situation


If your API is relying purely on the user ID for AuthZ, you have much bigger problems.


It's not just authz, it can also be a reflection of how many customers you have, and that can also be its own problem.

Or, let's say you are a middleware company and you're trying to contract your services to two other companies. These companies are competitors of each other, but they're also the biggest in their space.

If you have use, let's say, autoincrementing ints for orders or operations, then the companies could use the distance between order numbers as a way of calculating how much business the other business is doing.

If that functionality is possible / easy, that may be a reason for those customers to stop using you, and you've now lost one or two of your major contracts.

Apparently this has been brought up by others and is called the German Tank Problem.


Also auto increment IDs that are exposed publicly cause [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem].




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