Mark,

I have a combination of old and new systems also. It's "not my favorite" situation. (Polite way of saying I hate it!)

>Thanks Cindy,
>
>There is of course my normal candidate keys such as order number etc
>and it is these keys that I use when I have to carry out the update routines I mentioned earlier.
>
>My question is not so much on how to do the update the old records with the new because I do that already, I was just fishing for a free function:)
>
>It was more along the lines of 'is there an easier way of doing this that I am missing'
>
>My problem is that one of my systems which uses surrogate primary keys sometimes updated by a system that does not have surrogate keys. This is a legacy problem that is likely to stay a problem until I re-write the older system. The older system is really the one that should have been creating the surrogate primary keys in the first place.
>
>At present I have to keep writing routines that update the records in the new system from the old to avoid losing the existing primary key information.
>
>I expect I will have to take the time out to write a function that can impact the changes from one table onto another table.
>
>This might look something like
>
>ModTable(TargetTable,SourceTable,IndexExpresion)
>
>where one table update the other based on a shared specified index expression.
>
>I hope this problem will eventually go away when I change the older system, but I still have the odd bit of doubt about that as well:(