Objektiid

Objektiid is a term used in Estonian information technology to refer to unique identifiers assigned to objects in a computer system. They provide a stable reference that distinguishes objects—such as database records, files, API resources, or in-memory structures—from one another.

These identifiers are designed to be unique within a given scope, and often to remain stable over the lifetime of the object. They can be numeric or alphanumeric and may carry metadata or be opaque to users. In distributed environments, the design of objektiid must balance global uniqueness, generation locality, and performance.

Common formats include numeric IDs and non-numeric identifiers such as UUIDs, ULIDs, or Snowflake-style IDs. Numeric IDs are compact and easy to index but can require central coordination in distributed systems. UUIDs (universally unique identifiers) guarantee global uniqueness without a central authority but are long and not easily human-readable. ULIDs encode a timestamp and are lexicographically sortable, while Snowflake IDs combine time, worker, and sequence for scalable generation in distributed systems.

In practice, objektiid are used as primary keys in databases, keys in data stores, resource identifiers in REST or GraphQL APIs, and keys for caching or messaging. When designing objektiid, considerations include the required scope of uniqueness, performance and indexing, readability, privacy implications of encoded timestamps, and the risk of collisions. Proper design helps ensure reliable references across systems, audits, and data integration.

See also UUID, GUID, ULID, Snowflake ID.