UUID (Universally Unique Identifier)
A UUID is a 128-bit identifier designed to be globally unique without a central authority, often used as a primary key in distributed systems.
UUIDs let independent systems generate IDs that won't collide, which is handy for distributed apps, client-generated keys, and merging data from multiple sources.
Compared to sequential integer keys, UUIDs don't leak row counts and can be created offline, but they're larger and less index-friendly; newer time-ordered variants improve locality.
PostgreSQL supports UUIDs natively as a type and can generate them, making them a practical primary-key choice for many schemas.
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