🚀 Introducing Laravel ObjectId — The Fastest MongoDB-Style Identifier for Laravel Models

Hamada Habib — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 08:41:16 +0000

Works seamlessly with MySQL, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL — no MongoDB required.

Every Laravel developer has been there — you start a new project, define your migrations, and by default, your models use auto-incrementing IDs. It works fine... until your app grows, you need distributed systems, API integrations, or microservices. Suddenly, those integer IDs start to look like a limitation.

That’s where Laravel ObjectId comes in — a drop-in, ultra-fast, globally unique identifier system inspired by MongoDB’s ObjectIds, designed for MySQL, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL — no MongoDB required.

💡 Why ObjectId?

Unlike UUIDs or ULIDs, ObjectIds are compact 12-byte identifiers that encode timestamp, randomness, and a counter — making them sortable, lightweight, and unique across systems.

In numeric terms, they’re up to 3× faster to generate and smaller in size, which directly improves database performance and indexing.

✅ Works natively with MySQL, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL
🚫 No MongoDB driver or extension required

🧬 How ObjectId Works Internally

ObjectIds are 12-byte (96-bit) identifiers consisting of four key parts:

Segment	Size	Description
Timestamp	4 bytes	UNIX epoch seconds — makes IDs sortable by creation time
Machine Identifier	5 bytes	Randomly generated, unique per host
Process ID	2 bytes	Uniquely identifies the generating process
Counter	3 bytes	Incrementing counter initialized randomly per process

➡️ Total = 4 + 5 + 2 + 3 = 12 bytes = 24 hex characters

This design ensures uniqueness without any central generator and preserves chronological order, making it ideal for distributed systems.

For more details, check:

🧩 The Ecosystem

The Laravel package is built on top of our core PHP library:

🔹 wooserv/php-objectid: a pure PHP implementation of ObjectIds.
🔹 wooserv/laravel-objectid: Laravel integration with automatic model ID assignment and migration macros.

Both packages are open-source under the MIT license, created by WooServ Labs.

⚡ Installation

composer require wooserv/laravel-objectid

🧱 Usage

Model Example

use WooServ\LaravelObjectId\Concerns\HasObjectIds;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class Post extends Model
{
    use HasObjectIds;
}

Migration Example

Schema::create('posts', function (Blueprint $table) {
    $table->objectId(); // Creates a 24-char string primary key
    $table->string('title');
    $table->timestamps();
});

Generate IDs Anywhere

$id = objectid(); // e.g. 6730b6a0d8a28f890b7c9f40

🔬 Benchmark Results

Laravel ObjectId Performance (10,000 iterations)

----------------------------------------------------------
ObjectId             : 0.412 µs per ID
objectid() helper    : 0.417 µs per ID
UUID                 : 1.283 µs per ID
ULID                 : 1.147 µs per ID
----------------------------------------------------------
Fastest: ObjectId 🚀

Database Insert Benchmark (1,000 inserts)

----------------------------------------------------------
ObjectId   : 14.78 ms total (0.015 ms/insert)
UUID       : 15.48 ms total (0.015 ms/insert)
ULID       : 15.17 ms total (0.015 ms/insert)
----------------------------------------------------------

⚔️ ObjectId vs UUID vs ULID

Feature	ObjectId	UUID	ULID
Length	24 chars	36 chars	26 chars
Bytes	12	16	16
Sortable	✅ (timestamp prefix)	❌	✅
Randomness	✅	✅	✅
Readability	🟢 Compact	🔴 Long	🟢 Fair
Speed	🚀 Fastest	🐢 Slowest	⚡ Medium
Works with MySQL/MariaDB/PostgreSQL	✅	✅	✅
Requires MongoDB	❌	❌	❌

Verdict: ObjectId is the best balance between compactness, performance, and chronological order — and it’s fully compatible with standard SQL databases.

🧠 Why Developers Love It

✅ Automatic assignment — no need to manually generate IDs.
⚙️ Migration macro $table->objectId() — clean and intuitive.
🧩 Framework-agnostic core — works outside Laravel too.
📦 Compact storage — saves DB space compared to UUID.
🕒 Sortable by creation time — built-in timestamp encoding.
🧰 Database-compatible — works with MySQL, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL seamlessly.

🌍 Open Source Philosophy

Both packages are released under the MIT License and maintained by WooServ Labs, a collective of developers building open, high-performance PHP tooling for modern web apps.

We believe that open-source should be:

Simple to install.
Fun to use.
Fast by default.

If you share that philosophy — star the repo, contribute, or just spread the word 💫

📎 Resources

⭐ If you like it — give it a Star on GitHub and share it with your fellow Laravel devs!

DEV Community: Hamada Habib