pg_hashids: Short UIDs - Supabase

pg_hashids provides a secure way to generate short, unique, non-sequential ids from numbers. The hashes are intended to be small, easy-to-remember identifiers that can be used to obfuscate data (optionally) with a password, alphabet, and salt. For example, you may wish to hide data like user IDs, order numbers, or tracking codes in favor of pg_hashid's unique identifiers.

Enable the extension

<Tabs scrollable size="small" type="underlined" defaultActiveId="dashboard" queryGroup="database-method"

Go to the Database page in the Dashboard.
Click on Extensions in the sidebar.
Search for "pg_hashids" and enable the extension.

</TabPanel> <TabPanel id="sql" label="SQL"> ```sql -- Enable the "pg_hashids" extension create extension pg_hashids with schema extensions;

-- Disable the "pg_hashids" extension drop extension if exists pg_hashids;


Even though the SQL code is `create extension`, this is the equivalent of "enabling the extension".
To disable an extension you can call `drop extension`.

It's good practice to create the extension within a separate schema (like `extensions`) to keep your `public` schema clean.

</TabPanel>
</Tabs>

## Usage

Suppose we have a table that stores order information, and we want to give customers a unique identifier without exposing the sequential `id` column. To do this, we can use `pg_hashid`'s `id_encode` function.

```sql
create table orders (
  id serial primary key,
  description text,
  price_cents bigint
);

insert into orders (description, price_cents)
values ('a book', 9095);

select
  id,
  id_encode(id) as short_id,
  description,
  price_cents
from
  orders;

  id | short_id | description | price_cents
----+----------+-------------+-------------
  1 | jR       | a book      |        9095
(1 row)

To reverse the short_id back into an id, there is an equivalent function named id_decode.

Resources

Official pg_hashids documentation