UUID, can it be smaller than 36 characters and still be a valid and unique randomly created ID?

[Michael Mullan]

it's not hard to "roll your own" you could just use a simple counter, and base64 encode it, start with a 10 digit seed number and increase by 11 or 13 each time.

Make a temp table during the conversion to have the uid and the old code in case you need to revert..