>>No condemnation, but we're in the vein of "best practices", so I'm trying to talk about the rules. I have been known to break a few <g>, because I believe there are times that the purity of perfect normalization is more trouble than it's worth.
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>What I'm trying to make clear here, is that using meaningful keys is not 'breaking the rules' and using meaningless keys is not a sign of purity. Perhaps that is also true of some of your other 'breaking' practices?!

I don't know what you mean by that last sentence. It sounds kind of snide. I didn't mean to imply that a surrogate key was in the rules, but it is one of the things you can do - and is often done with great success - to achieve the requirements for an ideal primary key. I just never liked PKs that span multiple fields and use actual data. Though I have used them, in general, I try to avoid them.

>Yeah. Pity that not so many others have participated. They are all mainly occupied by political debates and smalltalk. :)

I kind of did expect a little more participation. Actually, I was looking for a political debate site the other day because I was so steamed about an interview our VP gave to CNN. As one senator has said, the VP is delusional.