Thanks for your input. Your response focuses on the normalization aspect & seems to support option "A" (with redesign of how keys are set up.)

Question: if a set of privilege setting options are specific to a given application, aren't they more effectively handled as attributes of that application's user record, instead of placing them in a separate "privilege" table? I thought that normalized meant that (A) all attributes are dependent of the key combination (which in this setting seems to be application + user), as well as (B) being independent of each other.

Thanks again,
Randy Witt