Yeah this was odd: "Superficially, it seems that embedding a timestamp in the ID can remove the need to track the creation time in a separate database column" Who actually tried to do this?
replyI didn't assume uuid7 was guaranteed monotonic either. Of course not if you have different clocks. That's not the point of it.
I have never tried to do this myself, for the obvious reasons you've stated, but postgres has a function to do it so clearly enough people did do it:
replyhttps://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/functions-uuid.html#...
uuid_extract_timestamp ( uuid ) → timestamp with time zone
Extracts a timestamp with time zone from a UUID of version 1 or 7. For other versions, this function returns null. Note that the extracted timestamp is not necessarily exactly equal to the time the UUID was generated; this depends on the implementation that generated the UUID.
uuid_extract_timestamp('019535d9-3df7-79fb-b466- fa907fa17f9e'::uuid) → 2025-02-23 21:46:24.503-05It makes sense. Since part of the UUID is a timestamp, there should exist a way to extract it.
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