Doesn't Postgres' UUID type just do this for you anyway?

Why would you store it as as str column and not the inbuilt type for this?

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/datatype-uuid.html

If you are using SQLite well I guess that doesn't work.

Small nit: uuid7 is 128 bits (16 bytes) by definition. So there’s no need to convert it to binary. It already is. Unless you’re working with a stringified version of the uuid7.

> and you should always convert that to binary to optimize everything

I disagree. I tried this once. Now you need a client access layer to touch the DB in any context. All your console tools no longer work well or at all. If they show up in URLs you need to deoptimize them for transport.

You give up a lot of convenience for this optimization. You should be absolutely sure your design requires it before using it.