The thing that really worries me when I'm writing SQL is the possibility that the query planner will get frisky and choose some disastrously slow join order, bu

The thing that really worries me when I'm writing SQL is the possibility that the query planner will get frisky and choose some disastrously slow join order, but only once in a while. I've run into way too many hard-to-reproduce performance issues like this. Having the database automatically figure out how to run a query is a great feature, but most of the time I'd happily just write explicit nested loops for the sake of predictability.