GUID vs UUID
A way of uniquely identifying something.
GUIDs are exactly the same as UUIDs
- In the Microsoft sphere, they are called GUIDs - Global(ly) Unique Identifiers. Invented in the 1990's as a Microsoft variant of the Apollo computer company.
- In the Linux sphere they are called UUIDs - Universal(ly) unique identifiers. Invented in the 1980's by the Apollo computer, and adopted into the Linux world in the 1990's
- They both became standardized so they are exactly the same thing, a rose by any other name…
So if you have heard they were not the same - you heard correctly. If you heard they are not the same - you heard decades outdated information.
They have a format that looks like this: 7dba836d-8ebc-4ed2-bd0b-d46a097f700c
The first few characters discuss which variant, version, they are.
The key to them is that it is considered for practical purposes impossible for 2 to be created that are the same. It is what has allowed the offline magic of MCe to be so powerful for decades. It allows us to uniquely identify two items created on two devices, even at the same millisecond.
You'll see them throughout our system they had been around for a handful of years before we started to use them in the early 2000's for CMMS and EAM. They have aged well.