I need to receive more wisdom from all you surrogate key experts out there. What do you think of the Tastrade sample app's way of making them? That is, apart from the fact that it uses a character field, which is easy enough to change. To refresh our memory, the Tastrade database has a table called "setup" whose fields are the names of tables having keys, and the next unused value for each key. The primary key of each table has a default value newid(), which is a stored procedure that looks like this:

FUNCTION NewID(tcAlias)
  LOCAL lcAlias, ;
        lcID, ;
        lcOldReprocess, ;
        lnOldArea

  lnOldArea = SELECT()
  
  IF PARAMETERS() < 1
    lcAlias = UPPER(ALIAS())
  ELSE
    lcAlias = UPPER(tcAlias)
  ENDIF
        
  lcID = ""
  lcOldReprocess = SET('REPROCESS')
  
  *-- Lock until user presses Esc
  SET REPROCESS TO AUTOMATIC

  IF !USED("SETUP")
    USE tastrade!setup IN 0
  ENDIF
  SELECT setup
      
  IF SEEK(lcAlias, "setup", "key_name")
    IF RLOCK()
      lcID = setup.value
      REPLACE setup.value WITH ;
              STR(VAL(ALLT(lcID)) + 1, LEN(setup.value))
      UNLOCK
    ENDIF
  ENDIF
    
  SELECT (lnOldArea)
  SET REPROCESS TO lcOldReprocess
  
  RETURN lcID
ENDFUNC

<\pre>

Does it look secure?  I'll probably do it this way unless someone sees a problem.  Thank you.