Is it better to use an "automatically incrementing" numeric field as the primary key. In this case, the company we get the data from recycles the key field [an insurance policy number] -- I don't know how they do it. Sometimes we need to reuse the policy id after it has been deleted [a policy gets "reissued"], but we can't reuse the policy id if it currently exists -- don't want duplicate policy numbers. Is it better to just seek that record to see if it exists before adding the new record rather than worrying about making it the primary key?

Thanks,
Doug