jasonk's reply feels more elegant to me -- avoiding the creation of the message, rather than hiding it. But both our original supplicant and I want to create a PRIMARY key, not just an index. My (perhaps naive) understanding is that a primary key provides an additional performance benefit by controling the placement of records on disk, and that it is not possible to ALTER a table to add a primary key. Given this, do I have to use tirwhan's message-suppression technique to get a primary key without extra noise? Thanks Topher