UUID as a primary key

[B J]

Hi everybody

I'm working on a project which needs a multi-master db architecture, there will be a central database and many 'client' databases used by applications which can run in offline mode.
When the app goes online, I need to synchronize its database with the central db, and to avoid conflicts and to be able to use a synchronization tool I found, the simplest way is to use a UUID as primary key in each table.

So the UUID will look like '00a0e535-452d-11de-b01e-993b5c1a70e4', which will be stored in a char(36). Will this impact a lot the performance on selects, joins etc?

I've read many times that auto-incremented integer are more efficient than strings when used in primary keys. If I convert the UUID into an integer (because it's composed of hexadecimal digits), can this be more efficient?

Thanks in advance for your answers.