Unique Identifiers (GUIDs)¶

Every open metadata instance has a unique identifier called the guid. This identifier needs to be globally unique - so even if two metadata repositories simultaneously created a metadata instance about the same thing, the GUIDs of these two instances would be different.

In Egeria, new GUIDs are created using the UUID.randomUUID().toString() method and they look something like this:

87b06ffe-9db2-4ef5-ba6e-8127480cf30d

They are often used on API calls to request a specific instance of metadata. However, they are not very consumable for people, so most metadata instances also have qualified names - also unique - and display names - not necessarily unique for displaying information to end users.

There is a tiny chance that two servers will generate the same guid. If this happens, it is detected by the repository services and messages are output on the detecting server's audit log. The repository services also have APIs for re-identifying (ie changing the guid) for a metadata instance.

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