>I suspect I don't fully understand their (surrogate keys) utility. I'll have
>to get one of the wunderkinder to explain it to me sometime.

Well, there are two main reasons. One is joins: a 4-byte integer key is a lot faster than, say, an 11-byte character SSN. The other reason is uniqueness: if you create a view on an order detail table, do you want to have to have the concept of order detail line number, so that you have a composite key (order + linenum), or just stick a 4-byte number at the beginning of each line? (not that this example really proves my point, but...)