UUID as primary key and download ID

Question

I'm designing a Django Rest Framework API with PostgreSQL. In the database I'll be recording information about documents which can be requested for download. I want the request to include a unique id, so the server knows which document to retrieve. Every document can only be requested once by the one user who has its id value.

However, I read that using primary key values (in my case would be a UUID generated by Python) outside of the database is insecure.

The question

So, can I use a UUID as primary key in the database and let users request the document by this UUID or should I generate another id for the user to request the document by? Any help is appreciated!

Answer 1

It doesn't matter much if you use an uuid or a bigint.

If you generate the keys in one database, using a bigint column with a sequence has the advantage that it uses only 8 bytes instead of 16. Also, counting an integer up is cheaper than generating a UUID.

UUIDs shine if keys are generated in several places independent from each other and the resulting identifier should still be globally unique.