What is a UUID?

A UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) is a 128-bit value used to uniquely identify objects across systems. They are widely used in databases, distributed systems, and APIs to avoid collisions.

Microsoft’s GUID (Globally Unique Identifier) is essentially the same thing — just their name for UUID. In practice, you can treat UUID and GUID as interchangeable, but we’ll stick with UUID since it follows the RFC 4122 standard.

UUID Versions

• UUID v4 – Randomly generated. Common and widely supported. Very low chance of collision.
• UUID v7 – Time-ordered UUID. Encodes the current time into the identifier. Useful for databases and logs where sorting by creation time matters.

UUID Generator