>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.


Mark, if I understand your situation, you are not truly "updating" the old parent record (meaning changing the value of some fields) but actually "replacing" the old parent records.

Sounds dangerous to me.

Isn't there anyway to actually _update_ the parent records?

Peter Robinson