George,

>DD,
>>
>>>
>>>Yep! I should clarify my statement a bit, however. It assumed a regular append without key generation when compared to one using an auto-increment column. Naturally, when compared with with a PK generation routine to do the append, it should be much faster. So there is a performance gain as well.
>>
>>Oh.. You mean gen the key at the same time as an insert? I suppose there could be an increase but I don't see what's different except that perhaps the VFP engine is gen'ing the key, which could speed things a bit. But that most likely would restrict us to Integer keys, which is fine by me.
>
>As I said to Walter, they're surrogate keys, so it really doesn't matter what they are.

Ok..

If the code to gen the keys is in a DBC memo field then is there really any speed advantage over either hand-rolled code or pre-written (by Microsoft..?) code? I doubt much unless you are a poor coder. <g>

If the code to gen the key (surrogate) is internal (ie. non-modifiable) then we're 'stuck'. If the code's external what's the diff between our & theirs? By all accounts the market (us) will sooner or later create better code. As such it makes more sense to make the code 'hookable' and as such who cares what kind of key you want and so forth? Particularly with resoect to those who already have a methodology I think this is really great. Total flexibility.