til/postgres/generate-a-uuid.md

Generate A UUID

Postgres has support for universally unique identifiers (UUIDs) as a column data type via uuid. If you have a UUID column, you may need to generate a UUID. This requires the uuid-ossp module. This module provides a number of functions for generating UUIDs including the uuid_generate_v4() function which bases the UUID entirely off random numbers.

> create extension "uuid-ossp";
CREATE EXTENSION
> select uuid_generate_v4();
           uuid_generate_v4
--------------------------------------
 a0eebc99-9c0b-4ef8-bb6d-6bb9bd380a11

See the postgres docs for more details on UUID generation functions.