Just a minor addition to make as I ended up with a weird result when trying to modify the UUIDs as they were generated. I found the answer by Rakesh to be the simplest that worked well, except in cases where you want to strip the dashes.
For reference:
UPDATE some_table SET some_field=(SELECT uuid());
This worked perfectly on its own. But when I tried this:
UPDATE some_table SET some_field=(REPLACE((SELECT uuid()), '-', ''));
Then all the resulting values were the same (not subtly different - I quadruple checked with a GROUP BY some_field
query). Doesn't matter how I situated the parentheses, the same thing happens.
UPDATE some_table SET some_field=(REPLACE(SELECT uuid(), '-', ''));
It seems when surrounding the subquery to generate a UUID with REPLACE, it only runs the UUID query once, which probably makes perfect sense as an optimization to much smarter developers than I, but it didn't to me.
To resolve this, I just split it into two queries:
UPDATE some_table SET some_field=(SELECT uuid());
UPDATE some_table SET some_field=REPLACE(some_field, '-', '');
Simple solution, obviously, but hopefully this will save someone the time that I just lost.