Feature Request: ULID Identifier Generation Strategy for @GeneratedValue

Hibernate ORM
1

Hi Hibernate community,

I’d like to propose a new feature for Hibernate ORM: adding support for ULID (Universally Unique Lexicographically Sortable Identifier) as an identifier generation strategy.

Currently, Hibernate supports standard strategies such as AUTO, IDENTITY, SEQUENCE, TABLE, and also has extended support for UUID.
ULID provides several advantages over UUID for certain use cases:

  • Lexicographically sortable: can preserve creation order in the database
  • URL-safe string representation
  • Collision-free across distributed systems
  • Useful for sharding or multi-region setups

Proposed usage example:

@Entity
public class User {

    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.ULID)
    private String id;

    // other fields...
}

Implementation approach could involve:

  • Creating a ULIDIdentifierGenerator implementing org.hibernate.id.IdentifierGenerator
  • Registering a new generation strategy in Hibernate similar to UUID
  • Adding relevant tests and documentation

I believe this feature would benefit developers needing globally unique, sortable, URL-safe IDs while keeping the convenience of @GeneratedValue.

I would be happy to contribute the implementation and submit a PR once the community supports this idea.

Thank you for considering this feature request!

2

Hi and thanks for your interest to contribute to Hibernate ORM.

Hibernate ORM is a technology to communicate with databases, yet no database seems to support ULID natively. Also, the Java language lacks a native data type. On top of that, it seems that ULID is “dead” since UUIDv7 (which we implemented support for) provides the same or better benefits apart from URL safe representation, though you can also just remove the - dash characters on serialization and reintroduce them during deserialization if you like the string encoding.

A UUID is just a 128 bit or 16 byte sequence that can be encoded however you like. You don’t have to rely on java.util.UUID.toString()/java.util.UUID.fromString() if you dislike its HEX nature and the dash of the format.

If ULID is picked up by major database vendors or the Java runtime, I’d be more sympathetic to your feature request, but as things are right now, I don’t think that adding ULID is valuable since UUIDv7 seems to be the better choice.