Comment on What happens when the US runs out of SSNs?
AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 2 months ago
We could switch to hexadecimal digits and we’d be good for 68 billion.
Comment on What happens when the US runs out of SSNs?
AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 2 months ago
We could switch to hexadecimal digits and we’d be good for 68 billion.
rbn@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
Why stop at hex? You could use the entire alphabet. Even if you take only uppercase letters and numbers, we are at 36^9 possible numbers. If we include lowercase and special characters from ASCII, we can go much further.
Piafraus@lemmy.world 2 months ago
E. G. For storage and performs reasons. 5 bytes vs 36 bytes. Multiplying by amount of users and various indexes - can produce very noticeably difference. More records per page.
rbn@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
If we assume that the SSN database internally only stores numbers today but could also store hexadecimal values without significant redesigns, I would assume that SSNs are stored as text already. So no matter if you put numbers, hex or text, 9 places will always use 9 bytes (assuming it’s ASCII only and doesn’t support UTF-8 etc.).
As the post implied that the current technical limit is 999,999,999. That very much sounds like a character data type to me. Otherwise, the limit is usually something like 2^x.
If SSNs are stored as numbers today, then hex and text would lead to quite some change. If you go for a re-design, you can as well just increase the length of the field.
kSPvhmTOlwvMd7Y7E@lemmy.world 2 months ago
This man backs ends^