Is a GUID unique 100% of the time?

While each generated GUID is not guaranteed to be unique, the total number of unique keys (2¹²⁸ or 3.4×10³⁸) is so large that the probability of the same number being generated twice is very small. For example, consider the observable universe, which contains about 5×10²² stars; every star could then have 6.8×10¹⁵ universally unique GUIDs.

From Wikipedia.

These are some good articles on how a GUID is made (for .NET) and how you could get the same guid in the right situation.

https://ericlippert.com/2012/04/24/guid-guide-part-one/

https://ericlippert.com/2012/04/30/guid-guide-part-two/

https://ericlippert.com/2012/05/07/guid-guide-part-three/

​​

The simple answer is yes.

Raymond Chen wrote a great article on GUIDs and why substrings of GUIDs are not guaranteed unique. The article goes in to some depth as to the way GUIDs are generated and the data they use to ensure uniqueness, which should go to some length in explaining why they are :-)

As a side note, I was playing around with Volume GUIDs in Windows XP. This is a very obscure partition layout with three disks and fourteen volumes.

\\?\Volume{23005604-eb1b-11de-85ba-806d6172696f}\ (F:)
\\?\Volume{23005605-eb1b-11de-85ba-806d6172696f}\ (G:)
\\?\Volume{23005606-eb1b-11de-85ba-806d6172696f}\ (H:)
\\?\Volume{23005607-eb1b-11de-85ba-806d6172696f}\ (J:)
\\?\Volume{23005608-eb1b-11de-85ba-806d6172696f}\ (D:)
\\?\Volume{23005609-eb1b-11de-85ba-806d6172696f}\ (P:)
\\?\Volume{2300560b-eb1b-11de-85ba-806d6172696f}\ (K:)
\\?\Volume{2300560c-eb1b-11de-85ba-806d6172696f}\ (L:)
\\?\Volume{2300560d-eb1b-11de-85ba-806d6172696f}\ (M:)
\\?\Volume{2300560e-eb1b-11de-85ba-806d6172696f}\ (N:)
\\?\Volume{2300560f-eb1b-11de-85ba-806d6172696f}\ (O:)
\\?\Volume{23005610-eb1b-11de-85ba-806d6172696f}\ (E:)
\\?\Volume{23005611-eb1b-11de-85ba-806d6172696f}\ (R:)
                                     | | | | |
                                     | | | | +-- 6f = o
                                     | | | +---- 69 = i
                                     | | +------ 72 = r
                                     | +-------- 61 = a
                                     +---------- 6d = m

It's not that the GUIDs are very similar but the fact that all GUIDs have the string "mario" in them. Is that a coincidence or is there an explanation behind this?

Now, when googling for part 4 in the GUID I found approx 125.000 hits with volume GUIDs.

Conclusion: When it comes to Volume GUIDs they aren't as unique as other GUIDs.

It should not happen. However, when .NET is under a heavy load, it is possible to get duplicate guids. I have two different web servers using two different sql servers. I went to merge the data and found I had 15 million guids and 7 duplicates.

Yes, a GUID should always be unique. It is based on both hardware and time, plus a few extra bits to make sure it's unique. I'm sure it's theoretically possible to end up with two identical ones, but extremely unlikely in a real-world scenario.

Here's a great article by Raymond Chen on Guids:

https://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2008/06/27/8659071.aspx ​ ​ ​

Guids are statistically unique. The odds of two different clients generating the same Guid are infinitesimally small (assuming no bugs in the Guid generating code). You may as well worry about your processor glitching due to a cosmic ray and deciding that 2+2=5 today.

Multiple threads allocating new guids will get unique values, but you should get that the function you are calling is thread safe. Which environment is this in?

Theoretically, no, they are not unique. It's possible to generate an identical guid over and over. However, the chances of it happening are so low that you can assume they are unique.

I've read before that the chances are so low that you really should stress about something else--like your server spontaneously combusting or other bugs in your code. That is, assume it's unique and don't build in any code to "catch" duplicates--spend your time on something more likely to happen (i.e. anything else).

I made an attempt to describe the usefulness of GUIDs to my blog audience (non-technical family memebers). From there (via Wikipedia), the odds of generating a duplicate GUID:

• 1 in 2^128
• 1 in 340 undecillion (don’t worry, undecillion is not on the quiz)
• 1 in 3.4 × 10^38
• 1 in 340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Is a GUID unique 100% of the time?

Not guaranteed, since there are several ways of generating one. However, you can try to calculate the chance of creating two GUIDs that are identical and you get the idea: a GUID has 128 bits, hence, there are 2¹²⁸ distinct GUIDs – much more than there are stars in the known universe. Read the wikipedia article for more details.

MSDN:

There is a very low probability that the value of the new Guid is all zeroes or equal to any other Guid.

If your system clock is set properly and hasn't wrapped around, and if your NIC has its own MAC (i.e. you haven't set a custom MAC) and your NIC vendor has not been recycling MACs (which they are not supposed to do but which has been known to occur), and if your system's GUID generation function is properly implemented, then your system will never generate duplicate GUIDs.

If everyone on earth who is generating GUIDs follows those rules then your GUIDs will be globally unique.

In practice, the number of people who break the rules is low, and their GUIDs are unlikely to "escape". Conflicts are statistically improbable.

For more better result the best way is to append the GUID with the timestamp (Just to make sure that it stays unique)

Guid.NewGuid().ToString() + DateTime.Now.ToString();

In a more general sense, this is known as the "birthday problem" or "birthday paradox". Wikipedia has a pretty good overview at: Wikipedia - Birthday Problem

In very rough terms, the square root of the size of the pool is a rough approximation of when you can expect a 50% chance of a duplicate. The article includes a probability table of pool size and various probabilities, including a row for 2^128. So for a 1% probability of collision you would expect to randomly pick 2.6*10^18 128-bit numbers. A 50% chance requires 2.2*10^19 picks, while SQRT(2^128) is 1.8*10^19.

Of course, that is just the ideal case of a truly random process. As others mentioned, a lot is riding on the that random aspect - just how good is the generator and seed? It would be nice if there was some hardware support to assist with this process which would be more bullet-proof except that anything can be spoofed or virtualized. I suspect that might be the reason why MAC addresses/time-stamps are no longer incorporated.

The Answer of "Is a GUID is 100% unique?" is simply "No" .

• If You want 100% uniqueness of GUID then do following.

  1. generate GUID
  2. check if that GUID is Exist in your table column where you are looking for uniquensess
  3. if exist then goto step 1 else step 4
  4. use this GUID as unique.

The hardest part is not about generating a duplicated Guid.

The hardest part is designed a database to store all of the generated ones to check if it is actually duplicated.

From WIKI:

For example, the number of random version 4 UUIDs which need to be generated in order to have a 50% probability of at least one collision is 2.71 quintillion, computed as follows:

enter image description here

This number is equivalent to generating 1 billion UUIDs per second for about 85 years, and a file containing this many UUIDs, at 16 bytes per UUID, would be about 45 exabytes, many times larger than the largest databases currently in existence, which are on the order of hundreds of petabytes

GUID stands for Global Unique Identifier

In Brief: (the clue is in the name)

In Detail: GUIDs are designed to be unique; they are calculated using a random method based on the computers clock and computer itself, if you are creating many GUIDs at the same millisecond on the same machine it is possible they may match but for almost all normal operations they should be considered unique.

I think that when people bury their thoughts and fears in statistics, they tend to forget the obvious. If a system is truly random, then the result you are least likely to expect (all ones, say) is equally as likely as any other unexpected value (all zeros, say). Neither fact prevents these occurring in succession, nor within the first pair of samples (even though that would be statistically "truly shocking"). And that's the problem with measuring chance: it ignores criticality (and rotten luck) entirely.

IF it ever happened, what's the outcome? Does your software stop working? Does someone get injured? Does someone die? Does the world explode?

The more extreme the criticality, the worse the word "probability" sits in the mouth. In the end, chaining GUIDs (or XORing them, or whatever) is what you do when you regard (subjectively) your particular criticality (and your feeling of "luckiness") to be unacceptable. And if it could end the world, then please on behalf of all of us not involved in nuclear experiments in the Large Hadron Collider, don't use GUIDs or anything else indeterministic!

Enough GUIDs to assign one to each and every hypothetical grain of sand on every hypothetical planet around each and every star in the visible universe.

Enough so that if every computer in the world generates 1000 GUIDs a second for 200 years, there might (MIGHT) be a collision.

Given the number of current local uses for GUIDs (one sequence per table per database for instance) it is extraordinarily unlikely to ever be a problem for us limited creatures (and machines with lifetimes that are usually less than a decade if not a year or two for mobile phones).

... Can we close this thread now?