9.14. UUID Functions
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9.14. UUID Functions #

Table 9.45 shows the PostgreSQL™ functions that can be used to generate UUIDs.

Table 9.45. UUID Generation Functions

Function

Description

Example(s)

gen_random_uuid ( ) uuid

uuidv4 ( ) uuid

Generates a version 4 (random) UUID

gen_random_uuid() 5b30857f-0bfa-48b5-ac0b-5c64e28078d1

uuidv4() b42410ee-132f-42ee-9e4f-09a6485c95b8

uuidv7 ( [ shift interval ] ) uuid

Generates a version 7 (time-ordered) UUID. The timestamp is computed using UNIX timestamp with millisecond precision + sub-millisecond timestamp + random. The optional parameter shift will shift the computed timestamp by the given interval.

uuidv7() 019535d9-3df7-79fb-b466-fa907fa17f9e


Note

The uuid-ossp module provides additional functions that implement other standard algorithms for generating UUIDs.

Table 9.46 shows the PostgreSQL™ functions that can be used to extract information from UUIDs.

Table 9.46. UUID Extraction Functions

Function

Description

Example(s)

uuid_extract_timestamp ( uuid ) timestamp with time zone

Extracts a timestamp with time zone from a UUID of version 1 or 7. For other versions, this function returns null. Note that the extracted timestamp is not necessarily exactly equal to the time the UUID was generated; this depends on the implementation that generated the UUID.

uuid_extract_timestamp('019535d9-3df7-79fb-b466-​fa907fa17f9e'::uuid) 2025-02-23 21:46:24.503-05

uuid_extract_version ( uuid ) smallint

Extracts the version from a UUID of one of the variants described by RFC 9562. For other variants, this function returns null. For example, for a UUID generated by gen_random_uuid(), this function will return 4.

uuid_extract_version('41db1265-8bc1-4ab3-992f-​885799a4af1d'::uuid) 4

uuid_extract_version('019535d9-3df7-79fb-b466-​fa907fa17f9e'::uuid) 7


PostgreSQL™ also provides the usual comparison operators shown in Table 9.1 for UUIDs.

See Section 8.12 for details on the data type uuid in PostgreSQL™.

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