Database

pg_hashids: Short UIDs

pg_hashids provides a secure way to generate short, unique, non-sequential ids from numbers. The hashes are intended to be small, easy-to-remember identifiers that can be used to obfuscate data (optionally) with a password, alphabet, and salt. For example, you may wish to hide data like user IDs, order numbers, or tracking codes in favor of pg_hashid's unique identifiers.

Enable the extension

  1. Go to the Database page in the Dashboard.
  2. Click on Extensions in the sidebar.
  3. Search for "pg_hashids" and enable the extension.

Usage

Suppose we have a table that stores order information, and we want to give customers a unique identifier without exposing the sequential id column. To do this, we can use pg_hashid's id_encode function.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
create table orders (  id serial primary key,  description text,  price_cents bigint);insert into orders (description, price_cents)values ('a book', 9095);select  id,  id_encode(id) as short_id,  description,  price_centsfrom  orders;  id | short_id | description | price_cents----+----------+-------------+-------------  1 | jR       | a book      |        9095(1 row)

To reverse the short_id back into an id, there is an equivalent function named id_decode.

Resources