On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 1:43 AM, Marti Raudsepp <ma...@juffo.org> wrote: > Obviously you can't use random(). That's why I talked about > cryptographic PRNGs, crypto libraries do proper seeding and generate > reliably random numbers all the time.
The difficulty lies not really in the PRNG implementation (which is hard but well enough understood that it's not much of an issue these days). The difficulty lies in obtaining enough entropy. There are ways of obtaining enough entropy and they are available. But they're not free. Obtaining enough entropy requires access to hardware devices which means a kernel system call. Kernel system calls are relatively slow when you're talking about generating sequential IDs. They also deplete the available entropy pool for other sources which may means they have security consequences. Which isn't to say they're a bad idea but like everything else in engineering there are tradeoffs and no such thing as a free lunch. You can avoid depleting the entropy pool by including data you expect to be unique as a kind of fake entropy -- which quickly gets you back to looking for things like MAC address to avoid duplicates across systems. -- greg -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
