I completely agree with you, yet I design most of my schemas with integer keys anyway. The only thing I do different than most folks is that I make a unique con

I completely agree with you, yet I design most of my schemas with integer keys anyway. The only thing I do different than most folks is that I make a unique constraint/index for candidate keys (the proper primary key) because otherwise we have lost the ability to ensure data consistency. As for why I use integer keys, it has always been the convention everywhere I go so I don't want to break convention. Now the only convention that I would rather see would be to use GUIDs instead of integers because I hate that I can join an item table to an employee table and get results back.