Discuss at least three advantages of including a primary key in a table.

What will be an ideal response?

Students should include at least three of these five advantages in the answer to this question.  As a part of the discussion of these advantages, students might note that Access does not require a table to have a primary key.

1. A primary key uniquely identifies each record in a table.
2. Access does not allow duplicate values in the primary key field.
3. When a primary key has been specified, Access forces the user to enter a value for the primary key field in every record in the table.
4. By default, Access displays records in order of the primary key's field values regardless of the order or when the records were added to the table.
5. Database requests are returned faster when requests for specific records are based on the primary key.