Dan,

Sounds good. And we're suggesting that the problems Chuch has would be eliminated by moving from a natural key to a surrogate key.

There are too many words floating around in my head!


>Hi Cindy -
>
>I think it's important to make the distinction between PRIMARY key and SURROGATE key. A primary key is any value that distinctly identifies a record. It could, for business purposes, consist of a user-entered value (such as an SSN), and would therefore require validation. In such an instance, that would be known as a NATURAL key.
>
>Surrogate keys, on the other hand, should never be entered (or even seen) by a user. These are most often integer or GUID values generated at the time of record creation.