>FWIW, I do wholeheartedly concur that using UNIQUE indices is generally only useful (in my experience) in doing direct data manipulation...Like in converting data from one system to another...or checking for potential uniqueness violations before assigning a candidate index.

Nancy,

There are very good reasons to use UNIQUE indexes in an application. One example, a sales tracking system where one report is the list of countries that there are customers in. INDEX ON Country TO Temp UNIQUE and then reporting followed by ERASE Temp.IDX would do fine.

One could also use SQL to get the same result.