I'm also firmly in the surrogate camp.  Key reasons for me are:

• simplicity of natural key updates (no down-stream updates)
• simplicity of joins (no multi-column keys)
• performance

I also very often...

I remember reading an article that tested this with many thousands of records and there was a material impact. Since then I have always used the more efficient approach...

Have to agree Steve. Here in Christchurch, thanks to the earthquake, I'm becoming intimately familiar with the other side of disaster recovery. Fortunately without too much drama, and...

If that's what you really want to do (ie. I'm not sure I would want to go this far ), but you might be able to...

I certainly don't claim to be an expert, but I do have some firm opinions on the choice of clustered indexes. Here's what I generally go by:

1. All tables...