Persistent IDs

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Upcoming Person ID Maximum Length Change in October 2023

We will be adjusting the maximum character length of PDL Persistent Person IDs. We will be launching this change in October 2023 to allow for ample time to adjust any of your processes impacted by this change.

Currently, IDs are 27 characters long. We recommend allowing for a 64 character maximum for our IDs and will not have any IDs beyond this length, but in practice we expect the changes to result in IDs closer to 32 characters in length. Existing IDs will not change or change length. Only newly created IDs will have the new length.

Persistent IDs allow for a significantly easier ingestion of new releases for our license customers. It provides for faster updates, a better understanding of how our dataset changes between builds and for collaboration between our license customers and products.

Goals

We created our persistent ID solution to do the following:

1. Maintain IDs across builds for the great majority of records.
2. Provide metadata on a lineage of ID movement from one release to the next.

How do IDs persist?

We built each production record in our dataset from many raw input source records. We further generate a record ID for each raw input record as it enters our ingestion pipeline. We then merge these records at some point into clusters of raw records that make up our final person records. Finally, we generate our persistent IDs by taking the oldest and most fundamental raw record that contributes to the final record in the cluster. This means that our highest confidence sources, which are the bedrock of our data, are contributing the majority of our IDs.

The only case in which an ID would disappear from our data would be if we removed a bedrock source, which happens very rarely and will continue to happen increasingly rarely over time.

For License Customers

Please consult our ID changelog to learn more about how this impacts your deliveries.