This misses the point. I'm not talking about finding hot paths, I'm talking about limiting the total predictable path count so you can optimize better. Or, as I

This misses the point. I'm not talking about finding hot paths, I'm talking about limiting the total predictable path count so you can optimize better. Or, as I often saw, when you have so many paths to different data pieces, you don't test every permutation of every combination of paths, and a caller finds one that hurts for some reason (e.g. bad optimization choice by your RDBMS).