ksuid

This is a Java port of Segment's K-Sortable Globally Unique IDs.

KSUID is for K-Sortable Unique IDentifier. It's a way to generate globally unique IDs similar to RFC 4122 UUIDs, but contain a time component so they can be "roughly" sorted by time of creation. The remainder of the KSUID is randomly generated bytes.

In summary:

• Roughly sortable by creation time;
• Can be stored as a string of 27 chars;
• Can be stored as an array of 20 bytes;
• String format is encoded to base-62 (0-9A-Za-z);
• String format is URL safe and has no hyphens.

For the story of how KSUIDs came about, see A brief history of the UUID.

Usage as cli

To use this as a command-line program on Unix-like systems, run

wget https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/com/github/ksuid/ksuid/1.1.2/ksuid-1.1.2-cli.jar
sudo mv ksuid-1.1.2-cli.jar /usr/local/bin/ksuid
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/ksuid

ksuid
# prints 1HCpXwx2EK9oYluWbacgeCnFcLf

Usage as library

Add the library to maven pom.xml (or the equivalent in your build system):

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.github.ksuid</groupId>
    <artifactId>ksuid</artifactId>
    <version>1.1.2</version>
</dependency>

Then simply generate a ksuid string like this:

String ksuid = Ksuid.newKsuid().toString();
System.out.println(ksuid); // prints 1HCpXwx2EK9oYluWbacgeCnFcLf

 

For more complex use cases, create a KsuidGenerator with a SecureRandom and get a new Ksuid for use.

Note that KsuidGenerator is threadsafe and Ksuid is immutable (and therefore threadsafe).

// Construct a new KsuidGenerator object. Since it is threadsafe you only need one.
private static final KsuidGenerator KSUID_GENERATOR = new KsuidGenerator(new SecureRandom());

// Get a new Ksuid object.
final Ksuid ksuid = ksuidGenerator.newKsuid();

// The toString() method is the string representation of KSUID.
System.out.println("ksuid:\n" + ksuid  + "\n");

// The log string format shows some details on one line, suitable for logging.
System.out.println("ksuid.toLogString():\n" + ksuid.toLogString() + "\n");

// The inspect string format shows details.
System.out.println("ksuid.toInspectString():\n" + ksuid.toInspectString());

The output from the code block above is

ksuid:
1HCpXwx2EK9oYluWbacgeCnFcLf

ksuid.toLogString():
Ksuid[timestamp = 150215977, string = 1HCpXwx2EK9oYluWbacgeCnFcLf payload = [124, 76, 43, -110, 116, -6, \
    -91, 45, 0, -125, -127, 109, 28, 24, 28, -17], ksuidBytes = [8, -12, 29, 41, 124, 76, 43, -110, 116, \
    -6, -91, 45, 0, -125, -127, 109, 28, 24, 28, -17]]

ksuid.toInspectString():
REPRESENTATION:

  String: 1HCpXwx2EK9oYluWbacgeCnFcLf
     Raw: 08F41D297C4C2B9274FAA52D0083816D1.1.2CEF

COMPONENTS:

       Time: 2019-02-14 23:32:57 -0800 PST
  Timestamp: 150215977
    Payload: 7C4C2B9274FAA52D0083816D1.1.2CEF

Performance

A very rough performance profile for generating KSUIDs was run on a MacBook Pro with a 3.1 GHz Intel Core i7 and 16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3 RAM.

public static void main(final String[] args) {
    final KsuidGenerator generator = new KsuidGenerator(new SecureRandom());
    IntStream.range(0, 100).forEach(i -> generator.newKsuid()); // prime the random

    IntStream.iterate(1000, operand -> operand * 10)
             .limit(5)
             .forEach(count -> {
                 final long start = System.nanoTime();
                 IntStream.range(0, count).forEach(i -> generator.newKsuid());
                 final long duration = TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS.convert(System.nanoTime() - start, TimeUnit.NANOSECONDS);
                 System.out.println(String.format("%,d in %,d ms. rate = %,d/ms", count, duration, count / duration));
             });
}

The output from the code block above is

1,000 in 14 ms. rate = 71/ms
10,000 in 32 ms. rate = 312/ms
100,000 in 95 ms. rate = 1,052/ms
1,000,000 in 881 ms. rate = 1,135/ms
10,000,000 in 6,665 ms. rate = 1,500/ms

License

This library is Open Source software released under the MIT license.