>>>I have a large table. It is indexed with a primary key. The table holds the current location of an engineering drawing in the sign-off cycle. I have a form that points to this table and gives the user the location info. At some point in a given time period the drawing can be released and the next revision level can be issued. My problem comes in when I try to put a new record with a drawing number that already exists. I mark the old record for delete but a pack is not possible until all the users log off. Even though the old record is marked for delete I still get a violation error. Thanks.
>>>
>>>God Bless,
>>>S. Dyke
>>
>>Ed gave you two valid options. There is one more: you can 'discard' field value for deleted records, e.g. replacing old value with some surrogate negative number.
>
>I never think of that, mainly because I don't recycle primary keys. If you do change the primary key, it's important to reflect that to any tables that might have records that are children of the altered key, so that when the key is re-added, it doesn't inherit the previous owner's "children", and if not re-added, they aren't left as "orphans".

I agree. Normally, orphand should be checked on point of deletion.