Gentlebeings, I've read the recent thread on devel->staging->deployment, and I wanted to share what I've done in the area. My main interest lies in moving away from monotonically incrementing integers as id values so I have a greater chance of being able to "shard" the drupal DB for high performance. As a first step, I am working on moving drupal core to using 64 bit integers. It was relatively trivial to change schema to create 64 bit tables, but right now there's nothing in schema that marks "foreign keys" as also being special. Would anyone object to schema requiring foreign ID references to be marked specially? Anyway, the direction I'm interested in heading is a 64 bit int + creation date timestamp for every row; the two can be combined to form a valid UUID if there are useful reasons for doing so. Note that Postgresql has UUID creating functions and MySQL 5.1 has uuid_short() which generates a 64 bit random int based on the UUID algorithm. The UUID() algorithm in mysql 5.0 isn't viable for scaling purposes because it's not cluster-safe. I do have some preliminary performance data on the speed at which one can create UUIDs: http://mindlace.net/archives/2008/06/23/generating-uuids-in-php-for-drupal/ I'm very interested in any feedback about the feasibility of at least widening the ids to 64 bits in D7. ~ethan