UUID Type

BinaryUuidType

UUID as BINARY(36)

Currently CakePHP mainly supports and promotes CHAR(36). The BINARY types are much more performant, though.

The clean way is to mark those columns as type uuid manually:

// In your Table class
protected function _initializeSchema(Table $table) {
    $table->columnType('id', 'uuid');
    // ...
    return $table;
}

But if you have many UUID columns for primary and foreign keys, you might want a more automatic approach. If you upgrade 2.x apps that use the BINARY(36) type, you can use the Shim plugin's custom type class:

// In your bootstrap
use Cake\Database\Type;

Type::map('binary', 'Shim\Database\Type\BinaryType');

BINARY(16) is even faster

BINARY(16) would be even more performant, but then you would need to manually hex() and unhex() directly in the database. At this point that cannot be supported here.

BINARY(16)

For this, please see Cake\Database\Type\BinaryUuidType that is now shipped by default with the framework core.