I like the textual representation of ULIDs as well though; I wish they’d just adopted ULID as v7. At least it is binary compatible with existing UUID types.

Is there not an equivalent text representation for UUIDv7?

Sure you could encode it in Crockford's base-32 but if it isn't part of the standard then tools won't implement it natively, so you couldn't copy a key from a url and look it up in postgres without running it through a conversion function, for example.

You can write a custom data type in pure SQL for PostgreSQL which is just transforming a visible string to the more efficient uuid type. That‘s basically how the uuid type can be implemented: For storage it‘s binary(16) but all operations transform the value to the visible string you see all the time. It‘s a pretty powerfull feature.

I was enthusiastic for a while but

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-createtype.html

> (This restriction is made because an erroneous type definition could confuse or even crash the server.)

Uhh, what..

> Generally these functions have to be coded in C or another low-level language.

Oh, okay. That sounds like this not really doable with many hosted Postgres services out there.