Did that (switched to Candidate key). I guess I will just accept the fact to "NEVER" allow users to input in a Primary Key (to me, it makes it look like it defeat the purpose for the Primary key's existance).

Chuck

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