Is there a way to generate a short random id, avoiding collisions, without hitting persistent storag

Posted by bshacklett on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by bshacklett
Published on 2010-05-08T04:05:08Z Indexed on 2010/05/08 4:08 UTC
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If you've used GoToMeeting, that's the type of ID I want. I'd like it to be random so that it obfuscates the number of items being tracked and short, so that it's easy to reference manually; UUIDs are way too long. I'd like to avoid hitting persistent storage merely for performance reasons, but I can't think of any other way to avoid collisions. Is 9 digits enough to do something time-based?

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