Uuid.md

UUID type class

BinaryUuidType

UUID as BINARY(36)

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

The clean way would be 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 to use 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');

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

BINARY(16)

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