"So simple the planner could not get it wrong" - and then you add a billion rows, or the business needs schema changes, or, or, or... If you want to have that

"So simple the planner could not get it wrong" - and then you add a billion rows, or the business needs schema changes, or, or, or... If you want to have that exact behavior I'd agree with the gp, we are talking about data access, but not all data access has to be a SQL database. Index hints are just that, hints, they are not commands - because there are tipping points that they just dont make sense anymore.