Re: Generate unique ids of maximum length

[jonadab]

I think you're trying to use the same field for two things: a unique ID, and a human-readable name. You can do that, but there are going to be trade-offs, and one of them is that your unique ID field, in order to remain human-readable, will be longer than would otherwise be necessary. You can use abbreviations up to a point, but eventually you're going to run into "I don't remember what L stands for, was that Lexmark or Luminox or Lenoc or Linksys or what?"

Personally, I would use two fields: a unique ID field (which could just be an auto_increment field if you're storing these in a RDBMS) and a separate human-readable name field that doesn't have to be so short. (You can put a must-be-unique constraint on the name field or not, depending on your preference.)

Just a thought.

[lima1]

Whould be cool, yes, but in my case unfortunately not possible. A visualization tool I need for downstream analyses only supports IDs of length 10 or less. So it just makes life easier when the new IDs are close to the old ones.