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>>>off the subject a bit, but what is a surrogate key and how are they used? looked in the developers guide but could find nothing.
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>>>thanks - brenda
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>>'Surrogate' key means that its value does not carry any business sense, i.e. it's usually sequentally generated integer.
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>i see said the blind (and sad to be at work) women. back in my mainframe db2 days, we used the timestamp. it was unique and always in ascending order. it created a self maintained table (no table or index splits) since all new rows were added to the end.
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>thanks

There is no guarantee in the PC world that a time stamp will be totally unique. Taz Trades uses surrogate keys, but it isn't very clear how they work. On my web site is an article on Primary Keys that is much easier to understand.