Hi:

I have two tables, one that holds some customer records, and another that holds their tasks. they are related by the customer id.

i do not allow others with my program to delete records. my major concern is how this affects the relationship between the two tables. if someone enters a new customer (say customer #1000), then enters a task for this customer, and then decides to delete the customer record, if a new customer gets entered it would have the customer #1000 and would now have the previous customer's task.

do i simply not understand what autoincrementing fields do? if someone deletes a record with customer #1000, would the next customer get #1001? Or, when programmers allow deletion of records, do they just have it marked for deletion but not actually deleted, so the customer # is still there?

Thanks!

Paul