Hi Markus ----

>IMO, all kinds of metadata should be handled by the back end. PKs should be created and maintained by the back end, RI should be maintained by the back end, and so forth. Logical issues like your cities example should be handled by the middle tier (of course).
>
>However, the point that was originally made was that data could be in an invalid state (from a technical point of view) if metadata like the PK wasn't assigned initially, and that was what Travis tried to respond to.
>

Travis made a good point and it wasn't lost on me :-) Technically and ideally, I totally agree with you as to the assignment of keys and constraint checks....I just don't like APPEND BLANK and I think it has been pounded into us over and over to use INSERT INTO instead of APPEND BLANK.

I guess I look at it the same way as the old SELECT command. Remember? You had to do:

SELECT 0
USE table

Now you can:

USE table IN 0 && Much more efficient and clean looking

So....why use:

APPEND BLANK IN table
REPLACE table.city WITH oCustomer.City,table.state WITH oCustomer.State

When you could use:

INSERT INTO table (city,state) VALUES (oCustomer.City,oCustomer.State)

See?