>Could you point me a discussion of intelligent keys or expand on the idea some more for me. Did I see some threads that advised against using them or am I imagining it:)

I think the reason their not used is so that there is something the developer uses to relate tables that the User has no oppuritunity to mess with. Otherwise, if the user changes the primary key (for example the Part_ID) you have to scan through every table where the old Part_ID and make the change there. What a pain. Now if the tables are normalized, and you change the Part_ID, the surrofate PK is still good everywhere in teh system.

http://fox.wikis.com/wc.dll?Wiki~NaturalKey~softwareEng