The Django UUID Story with Paolo Melchiorre

My first larger contribution to Django started during the sprints at DjangoCon Europe 2017 in Florence, where I worked on exposing database-side RandomUUID generation for UUIDv4 in contrib.postgres, so for me this topic has a very personal history inside the project.

Since then the way Django handles UUID generation has evolved, and recent changes extended these functions beyond PostgreSQL while also adding support for UUIDv7, which brings time ordering and new possibilities for modern database schemas.

In this talk I show how these UUID functions work in Django today, how UUIDv4 and UUIDv7 differ in practice, and how Django can generate UUID values at the Python side or at the database side depending on the backend and the use case.

This talk is especially useful for developers who already know Django models and want to better understand how UUID generation fits into real applications, migrations and schema design, especially now that support is broader and more flexible than before.

This talk was presented by Paolo Melchiorre at DjangoCon US 2026 in Chicago, Illinois, USA
https://2026.djangocon.us/talks/the-django-uuid-story/

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