A tiny Postgres extension to create valid version 7 UUIDs in Postgres.

These are regular Postgres UUIDs, so they can be used as primary keys, converted to and from strings, included in indexes, etc:

SELECT uuid_generate_v7();

           uuid_generate_v7           
--------------------------------------
 018570bb-4a7d-7c7e-8df4-6d47afd8c8fc
(1 row)

The timestamp component of these UUIDs can also be extracted:

SELECT uuid_v7_to_timestamptz('018570bb-4a7d-7c7e-8df4-6d47afd8c8fc');
   uuid_v7_to_timestamptz
----------------------------
 2023-01-02 04:26:40.637+00
(1 row)

uuid_generate_v7() is nearly as fast as the native gen_random_uuid() function. See the benchmarks for more details.

Version 7 UUIDs have a few advantages. They include a 48-bit Unix timestamp with millisecond accuracy and will overflow far in the future (10899 AD). They also include 74 random bits which means billions can be created every second without collisions. Because of their structure they are globally sortable and can be created in parallel in a distributed system.

1. Download the latest .tar.gz release and extract it to a temporary directory
2. Copy pg_uuidv7.so into the Postgres module directory
3. Copy pg_uuidv7.control and pg_uuidv7--1.1.sql into the Postgres extension directory
4. Add pg_uuidv7 to the shared_preload_libraries setting in postgresql.conf
5. Enable the extension in the database using CREATE EXTENSION pg_uuidv7;

# example shell script to install pg_uuidv7
cd "$(mktemp -d)"
curl -LO "https://github.com/fboulnois/pg_uuidv7/releases/download/v1.1.1/{pg_uuidv7.tar.gz,SHA256SUMS}"
tar xf pg_uuidv7.tar.gz
sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS
cp pg_uuidv7.so "$(pg_config --pkglibdir)"
cp pg_uuidv7--1.1.sql pg_uuidv7.control "$(pg_config --sharedir)/extension"
pg_conftool set shared_preload_libraries "pg_uuidv7"
psql -c "CREATE EXTENSION pg_uuidv7;"

pg_uuidv7 only requires the libpq headers and Postgres extension tools to build the code. On Debian, these headers are included in the libpq-dev and postgresql-server-dev-all packages.

To build the code run make.

A Dockerfile is available to build the code using the official Postgres Docker image:

docker build . --tag pg_uuidv7