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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