For using GUID/UUIDs as primary keys, Appian supports varchar datatypes; however this is not very performant for indexing. The UUID datatype was introduced in MariaDB 10.7 and supports index-friendly storage. Will Appian support this datatype for data synced records?
Our use case involves supporting data transfer and merge from distributed systems, so using GUIDs as primary keys prevents any conflicts upon merge. Otherwise, we'd need to clear out all the keys and generate new ones upon inserts (pks and fks). Also we'd need to maintain a mapping of origin keys to destination keys. This is a tedious process.
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Yeah you can definitely use strings as PK / FK values within synced records. Like most systems, you will likely see slightly better performance with joins with integers than with text. However, we've also done some specific optimizations to add dynamically created join indexes for text PKs that should make the performance good with text PKs as well.