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>True, but I was assuming that as the original problem involved deletion & packing, then there would be no question of wanting historical information (e.g. for auditing)& any related tidying up of child records would be sorted prior to the deletion. In which case, there appears to be no significant difference in overwriting the original record & deleting then packing, except that overwriting doesn't require exclusive access to the table.

The first thing the auditor will ask why was the data deleted? Then they'll tell you to go to a backup and get the data. IMO, you are much better off never reusing PKs.


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>I must admit that I thought the idea of deletion/packing would have it's own problems, mainly for tracking old versions. I would have tended to index on version & revision - I guess this is a type of surrogate index anyway.
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Why go to all this trouble...just never reuse a key.

>Paul