GUID – How many combinations are there?

Well I have used GUID’s (globally unique identifier) before in a number of applications and found today on MSDN the total amount of possibly combinations and thought – this is quite interesting. The number is HUGE!

 

Question: How many GUID combinations are there?
Answer: There are 122 random bits (128 – 2 for variant – 4 for version) so this calculates to 2^122 or 5,316,911,983,139,663,491,615,228,241,121,400,000 possible combinations.

 

You can find this referenced below if you ever need to know this information to inform your System Analysis, Project Manager or basically anyone wanting to know more about GUID’s.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Aa446557.aspx   >> See the bottom of the page for the statistics.

 

Yellow Duck Guy

Greg Olsen