cutdown uuid further to make short string
The UUID is 128 bits or 16 bytes. With no encoding, you could get it as low as 16 bytes. UUIDs are commonly written in hexadecimal, making them 32 byte readable strings. With other encodings, you get different results:

base-64 turns 3 8-bit bytes into 4 6-bit characters, so 16 bytes of data becomes 22 characters long
base-85 turns 4 8-bit bytes into 5 6.4-bit characters, so 16 bytes of data becomes 20 characters long

It all depends on if you want readable strings and how standard/common an encoding you want to use.
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