If I could go back 25 years and give myself advice, it would be this. A Lot of pain over my career would have been avoided. I would also tell myself not to use

If I could go back 25 years and give myself advice, it would be this. A Lot of pain over my career would have been avoided. I would also tell myself not to use sequential numbers for surrogate keys. They're massively convenient, but a real pain later on (data security, and distributed data being just two cases.) I know there are folks who like natural keys, but frankly IMO they're a straight-up bug. YMMV.