GUN — primary keys in decentralized databases

Gustav Corpas
3 min readJan 4, 2024
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

This is a short article on how to translate the concept of primary keys from classical relational databasesystems like MySQL, into decentralized graph databases, such as GUN.

Short prefase about GUN

Gun is a decentralized peer-to-peer database system, that allow you to store information right there on the device, and then synchronize that information with others. It is really cool, because you don’t really need a server to create your app :)

This is just a short article because I just realized something (took me awhile, and perhaps it is just super obvious to you) but I think this will save you a lot of time down the road if you are just starting out using gun and decentralized graph databases.

Primary keys

In a classical database structure we usually have a table with information like first name, last name, phone, etc. To make sure that we have a way to uniquely identify a data entry we may give everything a unique ID. In SQL and the like you can auto-increment the key to make sure every item is automatically assigned an ID. This is what I did when first learning programming, but there are a lot of times when this is actually bad practice.

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Gustav Corpas
Gustav Corpas

Written by Gustav Corpas

I write about technology and society. Or anything that is interesting to me.

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