title: 8 Character Random Code
body: <p>I've been through answers to a few similar questions asked on SO, but could not find what I was looking for.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a more efficient way to generate 8 character unique IDs, base 36 (0-9A-Z), than generating a unique ID and querying the DB to see if it already exists and repeating until you get a unique ID that has not been used?</p>
  
  <p>Other solutions I found use time, but this is perhaps too easy to guess and may not work well in distributed systems.  Consider these IDs to be promo codes.</p>