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

Since you're dealing with data from multiple vendors outside of your control, I would use a surrogate key. You don't want to have to rearchitect your database design one day when one of them happens to send you a duplicate.