NYCPHP Meetup

[Aaron Fischer]

Greetings,

I'm about to build a little mini application and would appreciate a 
little feedback/advice.

The application allows for a user to log in and view a list of hosts 
and guests.  The data is stored in two MySQL tables (one for hosts and 
one for guests).

The user will be able to pick a host and match them to a guest.

My plan is to have a column called match_id in both the host and guest 
table.  When someone selects a host and guest, the app will insert a 
unique id into both the host and guest record.  My plan was to use a 
date/time stamp (including seconds) to create the unique match_id.

Another page view will display the list of matched hosts and guests, 
where I will query both tables and join them by the match_id.

So, here are my questions:

Is there a better way to create a unique id than the time/date stamp?
What would happen if two users are logged in at the same time and make 
a match at the exact same time?  Not sure how MySQL handles when 
requests are being made at the same time.  Would it barf?  Could it 
potentially create two identical date/time stamps for two different 
matched groups?  (That would be very bad, given how I have designed the 
system so far).

Thanks in advance for any info and/or pointers, or even just validation 
that I'm on the right track.  =)

-Aaron