How much can you truncate a SHA1 hash and be reasonably sure of having an unique ID?
I am making an application that stores documents and gives each one a UID based on a SHA1 digest of a few things including the timestamp. The digest has a lot of characters, and I want to allow users to identify the documents by using the first x characters of the full digest. What's a good value for x if the number of documents is maybe around 10K - 100K?
Answer
Adapting the formulas on on wikipedia for the Birthday problem, you can approximate the probability of collision as 1 - e^(-n^2/(2^(b+1))), where n is the document count and b is the number of bits. Graphing this formula with n=100,000, it looks like you'll want b > 45 at least. I'd be more inclined to go with 64 to make it a nice and round number. That said, do have a plan to deal with collisions if they occur (maybe alter the timestamp slightly, or add a nonce?)
For that matter, if the sha1 is based on more than just the content of the document, why not simply make it a random ID? In this case collisions are less of a problem, as you can always generate a new random number and try again (the probability of a collision with a single try is the same, however).