In short, today, yes. Soon, no, but it might not matter. At the moment, status ids are strictly increasing. We can't keep generating status ids from a single critical section forever though -- at some point soon we'll have a loosely-coupled distributed id generation system and ids will be k-sorted. Perhaps the most significant bits will be monotonically increasing and the remainder of the precision will be opaque, and appear random. With any luck, the monotonically increasing precision will map, roughly, to time at a second resolution, so that the k-sorting will be within a second quantum. This would allow collation order based on the 1 second created_at and a collation order based on the most significant bits will produce a similar, but not identical, ordering. Largely speculation.
So, in the end, the date field remains the safest and the most future-proof way to sort statuses. -John Kalucki http://twitter.com/jkalucki Infrastructure, Twitter Inc. On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 2:36 AM, Quy <quyten...@gmail.com> wrote: > When I am sorting tweets, can I just do a simple sort DESC on > status_id instead of the creation date? I assume status_ids are > created sequentially going up so sorting on status_id would be more > efficient than trying to sort on the created_at field. >
