We have a table that we acquired from a vendor that has tables with PK of varchar2(1000) - the requirement is to stick to the same table design, so for the new SELECT only tables that we are adding that need to reference to this varchar2(1000) field, I was thinking of just using AK for uniqueness and not making it part of the PK. Any thoughts/suggestions on this ? BTW What is the difference between Primary key & alternate key - apart from alternatekey being able to store NULL. They both are unique & they both have indexes. Is there a difference in the way the Indexes are stored ?

Thanks,
Shiva.