Deciding between an artificial primary key and a natural key for a Products table

Question

Basically, I will need to combine product data from multiple vendors into a single database (it\'s more complex than that, of course) which has several tables that will need

Answer 1

I'd also go with an auto-increment primary key. The performance impact for having an alphanumeric primary key are there, though I don't dare name any numbers. However, if performance is important in your application, all the more reason to go with the autoincrement primary key column.