I'm looking for a very quick way to generate an alphanumeric unique id for a primary key in a table.

Would something like this work?

def genKey():
    hash = hashlib.md5(RANDOM_NUMBER).digest().encode("base64")
    alnum_hash = re.sub(r'[^a-zA-Z0-9]', "", hash)
    return alnum_hash[:16]

What would be a good way to generate random numbers? If I base it on microtime, I have to account for the possibility of several calls of genKey() at the same time from different instances.

Or is there a better way to do all this?

Thanks.