W O wrote: > Of course that no with people's names, just with control tables like > Countries or States which never have duplicates. It is exactly what UNIQUE is for ;)
I still have numeric keys for those tables as well so that I can use a simple link where I'm using the names in other tables, but bare in mind that 'states' and 'banks' may well have duplicates in different places which you MAY want to be able to identify differently, then Alexandre's comment might come in to play. The the business rules kick in, as it may be that using a combination of 'country, state, bank' is fine even though the banks being identified are not actually part of the same company ... or you can have 'bank - xxx', 'bank - yyy' as names. -- Lester Caine - G8HFL ----------------------------- Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/ Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk// Firebird - http://www.firebirdsql.org/index.php
