George:

I can see how an auto increment column may make it easier to work with VFP data, but don't see any benefit for working with SQL Server. Actually, I don't like the auto increment feature of SQL Server because you have to always make an additional round trip to server to get new key back to client when adding a record. I pefer to use a stored procedure to generate unique keys. In my framework, only one trip to server is ever made to get a unique key. At application start-up SP is called and key is returned, subsequent keys are generated on client by concatenating startup key with key created on client saving many round trips to server.

Charlie