> One question though. If you look at your projects, do you have a surrogate key for all (I said all tables intermediate results and cursor results included) ? I'll bet you don't. Then ask yourself why didn't you apply a surrogate key in this table. You may find one of the reasons i've mentioned before.

The only tables that do not have surrogate keys are those that don't get updated by the user, and that are not involved in any relations. IE, lookups. As soon as the need arises to do either of these things, the table gets a surrogate PK. In _all_ cases.

>>>Hmmm, maybe you should add "and Joe Celko disagrees".
>>Is he a VFP programmer?

>Does this matter ? Does the whole surrogate key issue restrict to VFP ? I think not.

No, but the questions on this forum do. Isn't that what this discussion is about?

>>Is it written in VFP?
>
>Again, I don't see the relevance in whether or not this is written in VFP. the general principles stay the same.

People don't generally come to a VFP forum to ask questions about general principles, they come to ask questions about how to solve a problem in their VFP application. Again, I don't see it necessary to end each of my posts with "But only in the VFP Universe", because we can generally assume that in the VFP forum, the topic is VFP.