So today I went ahead and cleaned up my UUIDField implementation. Originally it was just based off of a snippet. I wanted to swap it over to use a BINARY column in MySQL, after reading on how FriendFeed had been using UUIDs. Due to using Django however, you can’t use binary data or BLOB columns effectively. It tries to coerce everything to unicode so it ends up failing on any kind of binary data.

Instead of using a BINARY(16) column, I just switched over to a CHAR(32) (previously a CHAR(36)). In doing this I also converted the field to keep everything in the UUID format (to better handle passing around the values, and converting to any format you want).

All in all, the new UUIDField works as intended, and is a nice improvement over the simple “automatically insert a UUID here”, which is what it was before.

Grab the code on GitHub