It would appear that my so-called 'date' field is not a good field to have in a primary key!
You can have just about any datatype in your primary key. The only hard requirement is that the primary key must be unique. Using existing fields from your record which uniquely identify your data is called using a "natural" primary key. Another approach is to use a "synthetic" primary key by using an abstract unique identifier for each row in your table. Derby can assist with this by automatically generating values for such a synthetic primary key. Here's a great place to start learning about these issues: http://www.agiledata.org/essays/keys.html thanks, bryan
