Help! Primary Key/Normilization Questions?

I am migrating a MS Access application over to a VB client and a Oracle 7.1 server. The existing application contains some tables that have columns which are 95% unique but none that are 100% unique and use a counter column (Access provides a counter data type that increments automtically) to provide the uniqness for the primary key. This key is then used as the foreign key in numerous other tables.  

The questions I have are:

• Is there a way in Oracle to simulate the Access counter type? I tried the Oracle type ROWID but no luck.
• Do I want to simulate this, or should I normalize the tables even more? If I do this, I'll almost double the number of tables I have. Is this worth it to get 100% normilization? Also, one of the tables that will use these keys as foreign keys will be > 1 million records. The Access counter type used 4 bytes. If I normalize the table, the primary key would be 30 bytes. By normalizing without a counter I add 26MB to my table size for this one table. Is this good practice? (Does Oracle work this way, or are foreign keys stored as a pointer instead of the actual data which would not require the additional disk space. Any insight?)
• Is there a way to combine columns to form the primary key?

ANY help would be MUCH appreciated!

Steve... Received on Sat Jul 08 1995 - 00:00:00 CEST