Exposes hashids as drop-in replacement for your numeric primary keys.
- cloak the actual numeric primary key behind the record (assuming you use a non public salt) for URLs, APIs and alike
- build short unique IDs (Even PHP_INT_MAX
2.147.483.647
becomeslXQAALg
for example, solength <= 7
for the hashid)
- They are super short, especially for the URL
- They are lightweight and fast. They work on the fly and require no table fields, no code changes. No overhead involved except for enabling the behavior.
- You do not lose sorting capability as with UUIDs.
- You can use hashids if you do not want to expose your database ids to the user - while not compromising speed - as a balance trait-off.
- UUIDs can be up to 200x slower with growing DB tables, complex or heavy joins and especially with CakePHP default char(36). But even with the recommended binary(16) it would not be ideal.
- UUIDS often times completely replace the primary key, making it impossible to sort anymore on those records. This is especially problematic with data that gets inserted at the same time (same datetime for created).
- UUIDS are often used to just cloak the numeric primary keys visibility of how much gets inserted over time. But that is not what they should be used for. If you want to synch data across DBs, then they are useful. But they should not be abused for other things.
See http://sandbox.dereuromark.de/sandbox/hashids
composer require dereuromark/cakephp-hashid
and
bin/cake plugin load Hashid
See Documentation.