1) Natural keys suck in the real world, artificial keys have come to dominate for a real reason that you either understand or suffer for ignoring. Natural keys

1) Natural keys suck in the real world, artificial keys have come to dominate for a real reason that you either understand or suffer for ignoring. Natural keys are bad practice. 2) ORM's are good practice, they reduce massive amounts of duplicated code in applications and massively lessen development time which generally dwarfs the cost of execution time. If you don't use an ORM you are pissing money down the drain, most businesses are reluctant to do that. Using an ORM doesn't mean not using SQL when appropriate, it means using the ORM in the 90% of cases where it works best. Complex SQL belongs in views, which are then trivially mapped with the ORM giving you the best of both worlds. If you're doing complex queries with the ORM, the ORM isn't the problem, you are. 3) Should be. 4) Nor should they, programmers are expensive, paying them to do what a library can do better is a waste of money and time. You need a guy or two who knows SQL well enough to tune query and do indexing, that's your db guy.