> Sergey, can you, please, extend reasoning why this particular format is prominent? RFC 4648 describes a bunch of formats.
> Best regards, Andrey Borodin.
Base32hex:
1. Preserves sort order (unlike base64)
2. Compact
3. Standardized and therefore implemented consistently everywhere
4. Implemented in many programming languages' standard libraries
5. Does not require specifying character case during dictation
6. Has simple and high-performance encoding and decoding algorithms (necessary for system integration using JSON)
The only compact text encoding eliminates the problem of incompatibility. The authors and contributors of RFC 9562 were categorically against having multiple encodings for UUIDs. They wanted to have only one compact, sort-order-preserving text encoding. For compatibility, they added the canonical UUID format. Due to time constraints, the compact encoding was not included in RFC 9562.
In databases, UUIDs should preferably be stored in binary format (the UUID type in PostgreSQL) according to RFC 9562.
Intermediate formats (bytea) reduce performance, which is the very reason we even abandoned the more compact base36 encoding.
