IDs are Unique

A few untruths I’ve learnt having worked for a few global clients over the years about identifiers and how they operate in the real world.

  • There is one source of truth
  • Everything has a globally unique ID
  • Every thing has a single ID
  • Things never swap IDs
  • IDs never change
  • IDs only change rarely
  • IDs change predictably
  • The old IDs aren’t needed anymore
  • Every ID is in the same format
  • An ID is always numeric or ASCII
  • Case does not matter in IDs
  • Case does matter in IDs
  • A column will never contain more than one format
  • The latest Excel is the most correct
  • You can manage all of this with code