cutdown uuid further to make short string
If you are using MS-SQL you should probably just use the uniqueindentifier datatype, it is both compact (16 bytes) and since the SQL engine knows about it it can optimize indexes and queries using it.
I need to generate unique record id for the given unique string.
I tried using uuid format which seems to be good. 
But we feel that is lengthly. 
so we need to cutdown the uuid string  9f218a38-12cd-5942-b877-80adc0589315 to smaller. By removing '-' we can save 4 chars. What is the safest part to remove from uuid? We don't need universally unique id but we like to use uuid as a source but cut down strings.
We need unique id specific to site/database (SQL Server/ADO.NET Data services).
Any idea or sample from any language is fine
Thanks in advance