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Identifiers are better off without meaning
Once at Last.fm we had an integer overflow in anidentify field. I can’t recall where exactly. But I do remember thatthe inconvenience of having a bunch of Ha...
But I do remember that the inconvenience of having a bunch of Hadoop jobs disrupted while we rushed to update the relevant type couldn’t spoil the collective pride for having more than 2 billion of whatever needed so many ids. If you’re processing millions of telemetry datapoints per second, it’s useful to tell the type of reporting entity on the fly by decomposing the GUID, rather than perform an expensive lookup to an external service. The root problem being that, like the Domain Name System identifiers (“Galo’s website”) remain tied to administrative authorities (“.net”), which can change regulations, or even disappear.
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