>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?

To supplement what Larry and Rick said, you can create your concatenated keys using BINTOC() and make them compact and efficient.

Bill