[QST] What is the best way of handling string UUIDs in Merlin?

[BlakeB415]

Discussed in #1089

^{Originally posted by BlakeB415 December 22, 2023}
What would be the best way of going about this? I would rather not maintain a separate UUID to Int mapping table.

My original idea was to either Hash or Categorify the UUID values for training, then have the user_id_raw and item_id_raw string values be returned from the Feast store during inference so that my application can get the raw UUIDs.

However, Merlin does not support this paradigm as I get type errors during inference.

[BlakeB415]

Hi, it's been a week. Does anyone know how to deal with this? Thank you.

[rnyak]

@BlakeB415 please share your error message and also a toy example for us to repro your issue.