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>This might be simplistic & I'm probably missing some important point, but rather than add a new record & delete the original - could you not simply overwrite the original. That way the primary key remains unchanged & there's no need for surrogate keys.
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>Please let me know why this idea is wrong - I profess to being a beginner at this & need to learn.
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>Paul.


Still not a good idea. What happens if down the road you need to do an audit of somekind. What record was #456839? Potentially you could reuse the same ID many times. Now take that same ID and think about potential child records and you could have a real mess to clear up.