In a well normalized setup idk maybe not. Uuidv4 for your external ids and then have a mapping table to correspond that to something you’d use internally. Then you can torch an exposed uuid update the mapping table and generate a new one and none of your pointers and foreign keys need to change internally.

The point is, that mapping table incurs the same indexing cost that was trying to be eliminated in the first place. Normalization is irrelevant.

I wonder if there is a name for such a mapping table in RDBMS-land...?