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Every order, message, and user needs a unique ID. With a single database, this is easy: an auto-incrementing counter can generate a new ID for every record. But once you have multiple servers creating records at the same time, things get more complicated. The system needs a way to generate IDs independently without ever producing the same ID twice.

This lesson covers how distributed systems generate unique IDs without two servers ever creating the same one, the main approaches used in practice, and the trade-offs between them.

It also covers how to approach ID generation in a system design interview, since almost every system you design needs a way to identify its data.