In our first post about the RecID field, I told you that the first 7 characters of the RecID contain the date and time of the record's creation, to the 50th of a second. What are the other 8 characters for?

Character 8 - unknown, but usually a symbol, rather than a number or letter

9 through 12 - random

13 through 15 - seem to be related to the user's ID who created the record, but not 100% consistent

Fortunately, for my brain and yours, there doesn't seem to be any compelling reason to really care about these 8 characters, other than to take comfort from the fact that the characters in positions 8 through 12 would seem to provide enough randomness to guarantee complete uniquenss in RecIDs.

The first 7 characters, indicating the time of creation, are not, of course, guaranteed unique. Consider the case of an import into GoldMine on a high-speed computer. It's entirely conceivable that you could have 2 records created within 1/50th of a second. They would share the same first 7 characters, and so, would not be unique, if that's all there was to rely on. Hence the value of the additional characters.