Mastering Unique Identifiers and Distributed Locks: From UUIDs to CAS
This article explores how various unique identifier schemes—random UUIDs, sequential numbers, hierarchical paths, and distributed ID generators—are applied across programming languages, file systems, databases, and networks, and explains when and how to enforce uniqueness using pre‑validation, database constraints, or distributed locks such as Redis and Zookeeper, while also linking these mechanisms to CAS‑based concurrency control.
