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If you have a need for a ID that is unique but otherwise meaningless in a distributed system, feeding a concatenated node ID, timestamp (to ms), and looping transaction counter (mod a sufficiently large number) into a secure hash like SHA-256 should take care of it.

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Sure, that satisfies the uniqueness aspect if that's all you're looking for in an ID. But it doesn't satisfy the predictability aspect.

You can't know what the ID will be ahead-of writing the item to the database, nor store the item in a shopping cart without retrieving the item via a different piece of information (which is pretty likely to be SKU in this case)

When there aren't any connections to known unique keys (like SKUs for shopping), PK predictability isn't really possible (or necessary). The above formula is just an alternative to using auto-incrementing integers when in a distributed environment.

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