Question: why do we still use sequential ID's for identifying objects in data stores? There are many known problems with using numeric ID's (anyone remember Twitter's overflow issue), so when they are sent to a remote system, they should probably be strings anyways. Sorting or doing math on ID's is basically useless. Memory savings are the only thing I can think of, and while yes that's a nice feature, when a cluster of N nodes is generating ID's that are supposed to be globally unique, aren't UUID-type things better?