TIL Ksuid’s.

I learned about ksuid’s at work this week, and how amazingly clever they are. They conveniently provide UUID-like uniqueness but with a timestamp component for stupid simple ordering and cursor-based pagination.

Here’s a simple query that can be used to paginate over a table, via ksuid.

For the first page,

• $1 = ""

For the N^th page,

• $1 = last evaluated id from N-1^th page

SELECT id -- assume ksuid
  FROM items i
 WHERE i.id > $1
 ORDER BY i.id ASC
 LIMIT 50; -- arbitrary chunk size

This approach is directly inspired by DynamoDB’s LastEvaluatedKey option on its query command.