uniqueidentifier - Unique IDs with mongodb

Question

If I were building a blog I could use the blog title as the unique identifier and parse it through the URL. However, what if I wanted to use numbers. You know how twitter has www.twitter.com/username/statuses/9834542? Has anyone figured out a nice way of making this work? using "_id" is out of the question since it's way too long.

Answer 1

As long as you can guarantee uniqueness, you're not constrained to using the default "_id" MongoDB supplies.

Therefore, it's down to you how you generate this number. If you'd like to store this number inside MongoDB, then you could store it in a separate collection and increment it for every new URL required.

Incrementing a field is achieved by using the $inc verb, or you may want to take a look at how MongoDB can atomically update or increment a value.