John,

>>Who says a meaningless (surrogate) key has to be an integer? Integer is probably most often used, but guids are nice, too. And there is nothing to keep you from using a character-based field for a surrogate key, although that may not be the case here.
>
>I believe what I said. Here's why:

I agree with you about using meaningless surrogate keys. No argument there.

I was just pointing out that your comment, "...there is no integer primary key" indicated that you thought that the only valid primary key is an integer. There are other, perfectly valid, ways to do a surrogate key than just an integer.