Will UUID as primary key in PostgreSQL give bad index performance?

Question

I have created an app in Rails on Heroku using a PostgreSQL database.

It has a couple of tables designed to be able to sync with mobile devices where data can be created

Answer 1

(I work on Heroku Postgres)

We use UUIDs as primary keys on a few systems and it works great.

I recommend you use the uuid-ossp extension, and even have postgres generate UUIDs for you:

heroku pg:psql
psql (9.1.4, server 9.1.6)
SSL connection (cipher: DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA, bits: 256)
Type "help" for help.

dcvgo3fvfmbl44=> CREATE EXTENSION "uuid-ossp"; 
CREATE EXTENSION  
dcvgo3fvfmbl44=> CREATE TABLE test (id uuid primary key default uuid_generate_v4(), name text);  
NOTICE:  CREATE TABLE / PRIMARY KEY will create implicit index "test_pkey" for table "test"
CREATE TABLE  
dcvgo3fvfmbl44=> \d test
                 Table "public.test"  
Column | Type |              Modifiers              
--------+------+-------------------------------------  
id     | uuid | not null default uuid_generate_v4()  name   | text |  
Indexes:
    "test_pkey" PRIMARY KEY, btree (id)

dcvgo3fvfmbl44=> insert into test (name) values ('hgmnz'); 
INSERT 0 1 
dcvgo3fvfmbl44=> select * from test;
                  id                  | name  
--------------------------------------+-------   
 e535d271-91be-4291-832f-f7883a2d374f | hgmnz  
(1 row)

EDIT performance implications

It will always depend on your workload.

The integer primary key has the advantage of locality where like-data sits closer together. This can be helpful for eg: range type queries such as WHERE id between 1 and 10000 although lock contention is worse.

If your read workload is totally random in that you always make primary key lookups, there shouldn't be any measurable performance degradation: you only pay for the larger data type.

Do you write a lot to this table, and is this table very big? It's possible, although I haven't measured this, that there are implications in maintaining that index. For lots of datasets UUIDs are just fine though, and using UUIDs as identifiers has some nice properties.

Finally, I may not be the most qualified person to discuss or advice on this, as I have never run a table large enough with a UUID PK where it has become a problem. YMMV. (Having said that, I'd love to hear of people who run into problems with the approach!)