>P-Keys and F-Keys are not for our comprehension, and liking. Why do so many people have to mess with a good thing?
>
>__Stephen


Out of about 40 tables in my reservation system all but one uses an auto-incrementing integer surrogate primary key. The one exception is a key which includes a unit number which refers to a building. The building isn't going anywhere and, most probably, will never be renumbered. So far I haven't had to regret the decision to make this primary key refer to the real world.

But it has occured to me that saving 4 bytes in one table probably does not justify this one exception to the standard approach.

Surrogate keys for ever!

Peter Robinson