title: Python shortest unique id from strings
body: <p>I have more than 100 million unique strings (VARCHAR(100) UNIQUE in MySQL database). Now I use the code below to create unique hash from them (VARCHAR(32) UNIQUE) in order to reduct index size of the InnoDB table (a unique index on varchar(100) is roughly 3 times larger than on varchar(32) field).</p>
  
  <pre><code>id = hashlib.md5(str).hexdigest()
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Is there any other method to create shorter ids from those strings and make reasonable uniqueness guarantees?</p>