Completely agree coming from years of experience with MSSQL using it before it had good hinting, its very necessary. I don't care how good your optimizer is, i

Completely agree coming from years of experience with MSSQL using it before it had good hinting, its very necessary. I don't care how good your optimizer is, its not going to replace a human that knows what they are doing anytime soon. I try real hard not to use hints and most of the time you don't, but sometimes you just do. To not have it will simply make you find whatever hacky way there is to beat the optimizer into submission to get the job done. Its funny to see similar complaints about the V8 jitter now app developers get to experience a black box optimizer making different brain dead choices in production vs development environments.