>>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.
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>>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.
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>As Janice Booth says, "Natural Keys aren't". I don't have a problem with setting up natural keys as candidates, but in every case where some has said "this value will always be unique/never change" they've lied <g>.
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>Given the repercussions of getting this wrong, it's probably worth pushing harder (is there anyone else there who can help support you so it's not just a matter of you vs the database person)? Decisions like this make me crazy. Let's suppose, out of hundreds of tables they happen to choose a natural key and there is a business change that means that natural key now suddenly needs one more field to make it unique. You've literally just broken every query that touches that table and will have to add a new field to every other table that references it, plus fix all of your queries. He's literally setting you up for a huge headache in the future (not if, when). Insane.
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>Everyone is going to be living with (and suffering with) those decisions, so it's worth a bit of a fight.

I completely agree Paul. I plan to have more discussion about this. You bring up a good idea though in soliciting someone else to help. I have an idea who that could be.
Thanks