Hacker News Reader

MySQL doesn't have a UUID type, nor 128-bit int type. But MySQL 8 does provide functions UUID_TO_BIN and BIN_TO_UUID, which make it trivial to convert between the human-readable string representation of a UUID and the more efficient BINARY(16) representation.

MariaDB now has a native UUID column type as of MariaDB 10.7. This is brand new -- 10.7 had its RC release in Nov, not GA yet but very soon I'd imagine.

If you use a type1 UUID, you shouldn't have quite so random distribution, particularly if there's only a single machine generating the UUIDs (which admittedly, kind of misses the point, but alas is done all the time).

Well, you probably shouldn't cluster on a UUID, but it's not really a great idea to blindly cluster on a sequential id, either. You should cluster based on how you query the data to minimize I/O.