>I can't think of a good reason to use a character data-type for a surrogate primary key. The integer data-type seems particularly well suited for surrogate primary keys, and you can always STR it if you need to concatenate it with another field. Using the STR of a numeric value for the key itself seems like unnecessary overhead.
Then, what about using GUID ? It's character type and it's BIG - 38 char long...
Nick Neklioudov
Universal Thread Consultant
3 times Microsoft MVP - Visual FoxPro
"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that don't work." - Thomas Edison