Here at my job we have a database modeler in our group. He is insistent that all tables use 'Natural Keys' and not surrogate keys. I am not trying to start a battle or anything, but is this really even still a debate? It does not matter how much logical reason I provide him, he is propagating his plan across the company and it does not seem to matter what the impact will be. This is a global company in 140 countries with data centers all over the world.

My only questions is: Has something changed and I missed it? We are talking about values that users see and will want to change being used as primary keys on the tables.