[Bytewave81]

The idea is that you encode and decode database IDs with this. You wouldn't save them separately unless you were using it for a purpose other than shareable "identifiers" which don't leak significant amounts of database state. Imagine something like a link shortener where you want to provide a short link to users, but don't want it to just be a number.

[ComputerGuru]

My point was that this only encodes numbers and you wouldn’t use numbers as primary keys for the reasons outlined.

[hot_gril]

These leak the state just as much. They're reversible back to integers.