You probably don’t need a UUID

My troubles with record identifiers starts with a web site I developed, Eksi Sozluk. It's been one of the most popular Turkish web sites in the world for the last quarter century. When I first wrote it in 1999, I had to run it on a remote hosting service with no way to install external tools. All I had access to was their FTP server. So, I improvised and decided to keep every record in a single text file. Yeah, bad idea, but it worked at the beginning.There were no record identifiers, only topics and free-form list of entries. Deleting a specific record involved me downloading a single big text file from FTP, deleting relevant lines, and uploading the file back again.Then, I had to develop a UI for it, and it was immediately apparent that I needed a unique ID for every record to make it less painful.In mere months, I was convinced that I had to use an actual database instead of a plain text file as the number of users grew quickly. I decided to migrate to MS Access. Yes, I know,…