>>I would disagree with that. Just adding a new PK field to a record which already had a multifield PK doesn't remove the necessity for normalization. The problems involved with 4NF (I wouldn't worry too much about 5NF; it's quite unlikely to pop up) don't get solved by adding more PK's to a table.
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>4th normal form states that the primary key composed of more than one attribute will not have independently multivalued components of the primary key. Therefore if the pk is a single field the 4th normal form does not apply. 4th normal form speaks nothing about other candidate keys, only the primary key and any table has only one primary key. 5th normal form also speaks only about the primary key of three or more component attributes.

OK, I agree, but I talked about "the problems involved with 4NF". When you have independent multivalued key components --for any key, be it candidate or primary-- you have update problems, redundancy problems, and so on.

On second thought, the definition I had for 4NF didn't make any difference between keys; I think it said that a relation was in 4NF if whenever there was a multivalued non-trivial dependency X->>Y, X was a candidate key for R. And I'm pretty sure that the BCNF definition didn't make any difference either between PK and CK's.

Anyway, I would say that NF definitions aren't that important; the problems they apply to are what matters, and adding a surrogate key doesn't make them disappear.

Just my $0.02!