Oxide Computer published their Request for Discussion (RFD) site software [1] that they use for internal published documentation and discussion. Many are published to the public, but some are private. [2] They talk about how they use it and where it came from in their most recent podcast: RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide [3].

I suspect this would be a good 'substitute' for documents that are often hosted on internal wikis.

[1]: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/rfd-site

[2] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0001

[3]: https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends/2065190

My recommendation is, if you want a wiki for developers, use something that is based on a markup language, sources pages from a git repo, and does not do too much magic behind the scenes. This will result in a more maintained and liked wiki than any bloated SaaS wiki.

I don't think it really matters which you use. I've unfortunately been stuck in Atlassian for ages.

But if you were shopping for one, from the standpoint of keeping the docs working being able see missing pages and see incoming links to a page are both pretty helpful. I kinda miss the latter.

If you can self host, wiki.js is easy to set up in a docker container. Mediawiki (What Wikipedia runs on) is pretty easy too.

If you have a small team, Obsidian and a syncing solution like git or obsidian sync might work.

I was able to work with my company’s it team to set up a wiki which is only accessible from within the network, including by vpn, and is hosted on a vps.

Confluence, but we're already in deep w Atlassian

It depends on the use cases and performance goals. You may want to distribute the rows that you insert, and then a random UUID makes sense. However, it is too much distributed for B-Tree indexes and the problem is not only cache but the amount of modifications due to leaf block splits. This includes MySQL which stores the primary key in a B-Tree index. Other use cases may benefit from colocating the rows that are inserted together. Think of timeseries, or simply an order entry where you query the recent orders. A sequence makes sense there, to have a good correlation between the index (on time) and the primary key. This avoids too many random reads with low cache hits.

It is wrong to think that distributed databases do not need sequences. YugabyteDB allows it. With YugabyteDB you use hash sharding to distribute them to a small number of hash ranges, so that they don0t go all at the same place, but are not scattered across the whole database. CockroachDB and Spanner doesn't have hash sharding and that's why they do not recommend sequences. There are also use cases where range sharding on the sequence is good when you don't need to distribute the data ingest, but benefit from their colocation when querying.

Yeah, Spanner is also clear about this. It doesn't even have sequences, and their docs say to use random pkeys rather than time-dependent things like uuid7.

> Won't you still need indexes on those UUIDs anyway?

Depends on how index pages are structured in the DB. With MySQL (assuming the InnoDB engine) the primary key is pretty much always a clustered index, in MS SQL Server this is the case more often than not too. This means that any page expansion due to splits from the randomness of the data being inserted affects the whole table not just the key index, and rebuilding to claim back the wasted space later will take a lot longer as you are moving all your based data around. With the UUID as a supplementary key, likely indexed on its own, all that gets enlarged by excess page splitting is those 128-bit values not the entire rows and an index rebuild to fix that up after the fact moves a lot less data around.

So yes, you have an extra index on top of your primary key and other additional ones needed by your apps and reports, but not having a random UUID as your clustering key can be a significant benefit. Using more ordered UUIDs minimises this difference considerably though.

Even ignoring the random-key-causes-page-splits issue, if you've mitigated it with more ordered UUIDs, a wider primary key increases the size of all supplementary indexes assuming MySQL arranges things similarly to SQL Server: rather than having a hidden page/row identifier (as SQL Server does without any clustered key defined, it calls such arrangements heap tables), each supplementary index includes the clustering key value with every row. So while having a 32-bit primary key for internals and the 128-bit UUID as an extra key adds 4 bytes per row (for the extra INT32) to the base data, it saves 12 bytes from each row in each non-clustered index (as the INT32 is included, not the UUID).

> And possibly have to do more joins to resolve them?

Usually not. Usually when you have both the INT32 (or sometimes IN64) surrogate key is for all internal use and a UUID only for external references, so the UUIDs are only important as the initial filter and not likely not taking part in a JOIN at all. After the initial filter to find the item you want in the main table of the query, the JOINs to collect data from other tables will all be by the surrogate (INT) keys. The UUID is almost never used as a foreign key reference in this arrangement.

Yes, if a client gives a UUID and you want to look up relations to that table, you'll have to join with that table. And the index on the UUID has its own costs. It's still better this way. If for some rare reason this join is too expensive, there are other options like using a cache or denormalizing the tables slightly. The alternative of a UUID pkey will seriously slow down every join.

One question is whether you do random or k-sorted UUIDs for a secondary key. K-sorted is likely faster, but in many cases the difference is small enough that you'd rather take the easy random route which is also guaranteed not to leak any info.

You only need 1 index on the UUID. Instead of everywhere the UUID is referenced from other tables

It's not just about the data size. There are reasons your sequence can increment without a row actually being inserted.

DB vendors haven't done enough to offer ID generation as a core part of their system. Ideally "what ID do I use for this object" shouldn't even be a consideration, because of course the database should handle it. It is the system of record after all. Yet your options are pretty much limited to UUID or a basic incremental counter that fails to meet any real world production constraints.

Because we keep telling people the opposite in academic settings, where the pkey is usually some actual data field(s) you expect to be unique. There's some point to teaching 3NF this way, but it shouldn't be taken literally.

they do mention that it’s is good to have both. also using a newer uuid version that is more sortable temporally is also wise.

> Use regular bigserial (64bit) PKs for internal table relations and UUIDs (128bit) for application-level identifiers and natural keys. Your database will be very happy!

Maybe? idk. Not in Postgres. The default index is a B-Tree. A hash-based index would be terrible for disk-seeking, in any case.

Clustered tables and sequential keys have their own downsides though like lock contention on the "last" page.

> Nothing wrong with 128bits primary key. Postgres is a horrible DB that can’t order rows on disk, so it doesn’t matter if you use UUIDs or not, you’re SOL.

Why do you believe a database should order rows on disk?

The "reject all" button works better now, thanks for bringing this up.

It takes all the screen space from latitude 0° to -90°!!!

Note that, in the abstract, “vulgar” means “common” (as in “vulgar latin”). Indeed, its negative connotations come from that same sense: “common” people are unrefined.