>The only good reason I can think of to use a character based primary key is that it allows for the use of concatinated keys. This ability doesn't seem to out-weight the performance issues so why would I ever use a character based primary key? Am I missing the boat here? Is there some hidden advantage to it? If not, why do most all of the frameworks I have looked at default to it?

The performance issues between character- and integer- based keys is not that significant when dealing with small character fields. Integers are 4 bytes with a maximum of 2.147 billion. A 4 byte character field has 4.29 billion possible values. While this exceeds the current 2GB record limit of VFP tables, this may not be true in the future. Also, there is the matter of discarded key values to account for. So you may need more than 2 Gig values.