On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 10:16 AM, Otis Gospodnetic<[email protected]> wrote: > Excellent, was thinking the same thing last night, too - I'm probably not the > only person using Strings, so a "here is what > you can use to switch to longs" either as documentation or actual code would > be helpful. > And I, too, quickly looked at hashCode yesterday to see if I can just use > that, but then realized it was int. I like the big > wheel analogy. :)
The problem with using a hash is that they can generate collisions... using an excellent 64 bit hash will only allow millions (at most) of ids before the probability of collision becomes to great. At ~190M ids, the probability of collision becomes .1% - too high to rely on the output of such a system with confidence. -Yonik http://www.lucidimagination.com
