I am not a DBA myself but a developer who has spent a lot of time studying, database

design.

Not all Companies have a DBA, my experience is that most SME's just allow developers to develop databases and if it works that is fine.

From adeveloper point of view I would totally agree with the points made about Natural keys as I am constantly tearing my hair out at the databases I come accross that have an identity as the key when a natural key exists. The worst practice I have found is placing an identity column on a many 2 many resolution table and making it the PK rather than having a compound key.

I have also found that the use of identity keys can cause no end of problems when you wish to perform a simple task such as importing data from another database of the same design. I have found myself running queries that add 200 to every key in the app having already removed all constraints and identity settings and then importing the data with identity override on.

I am very pleased to see articles tat are aimed at developers as well as DBA's

but would take issue with encouraging the use of identity fields.