Tanax I dont get that example, why would he have to do it manually? It could all be done automatically with minimal performance loss.

I can argue against that because now you have a numerical id, and therfore HAVE to make a join to the master table to make sense out of that numerical ID. And usually when I have to create a table which will reference another table then it usually done with GUID rather then int. I've found auto increment giving me a lot of problems before (espeically with duplicating, deleting etc etc)

Village Idiot, I didn't say not to have a primary key. And theres not really that much of a difference between an int and char primary key. In most cases it actually makes things easier.