Exposing Ids: int Identity, GUID v7 and the Public Id Split
The most balanced way to expose an id is a bigint identity as the internal clustered key, an immutable unique PublicId outside, and an ownership condition in every query. In our measurement Guid.CreateVersion7 fragmented as badly as v4 in SQL Server (99 percent, 4,987 pages), because SQL Server sorts uniqueidentifier by its last 6 bytes; EF Core's sequential generator stayed close to identity.
7 Nov 2026
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13 min
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