Imagine you’re building a TurboTax-like piece of software which allows users to navigate to specific slides in the application via permanent URLs. The slides are created and stored in the database via INSERT scripts.

Obviously, when migrating the data from server to server, the auto-generated UUIDs are going to be randomized, so using them as identifiers in the URLs is a no-go.

Creating a unique “persistent identifier” column sounds like a good solution to this issue, as the identifiers will persist from database to database.

Are there any gotchas or best practices for doing so?