In a previous article, I talked about Snowflake IDs . They are great, but they require a bit of configuration because you need to manage "Worker IDs."

If you want something simpler that gives you the same benefits - secure URLs and fast database sorting—you should look at ULIDs (Universally Unique Lexicographically Sortable Identifiers).

Why not just use UUIDs?

Most developers switch from auto-incrementing integers to UUIDs because they want to hide their business volume. If your order ID is order/550e8400-e29b... , no one knows if you have 1 customer or 1 million.

But UUIDs have a major problem: they are completely random.

When you insert millions of random UUIDs into a database, the "B-Tree" index gets fragmented and slow. Your database has to jump all over the hard drive to find where to put the new data.

ULIDs fix this.

A ULID is 128 bits (just like a UUID), but the first part of the ID is a timestamp . This means ULIDs are chronological.…