Comments on: When unique isn’t really unique

By: Ahmad Mukoshy

Ahmad Mukoshy — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 01:34:20 +0000

I've been using uniqid() for months now #Lolz . I came across it on the php docs web site after hustling with my rand() md5 hash.

Cool stuv… I like this.

By: Tim

Tim — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:09:14 +0000

No particular reason actually. Except you intend to store a very large data set, MD5 should do just about well. SHA-1 on the other hand reduces the probability of a collision further but will take more storage space.

By: Tim

Tim — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 23:51:25 +0000

As long as your unique identifier generator produces values that have a nearly zero probability of collisions, it really doesn't matter how you go about it so I'm happy with whatever works. May be you could show us some code

Looks like your first time here too. Welcome to my blog.

By: austin_web_developer

austin_web_developer — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 08:52:31 +0000

Any particular reason you didn't use a sha-1 hash?

By: @digitalcraft

@digitalcraft — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 19:22:30 +0000

Cool,
and Funny I'm only coming across that function, uinqid, for the first time

When I had to do unique in the past especially on ecommerce payment gateway's transaction reference (like interswitch) or user account activation process, I made use of the a combination of the time (UNIX TIME) and the user's IP to generate a dynamic unique number suffix which I then attached to another hard coded static unique number prefix…

I figured that the unix time and the user's IP and the application static reference will always return a unique combination…crazy eh, but so far it works.

I'll not claim is error proof as such I think the way to go (and lazy way at that) is uiqid, Thanks