> but, weirdly, can't "SELECT * FROM A_Index". In all honesty, most DBMSes have some sort of "hinting" mechanism that accomplishes roughly the same. It's a cl

> but, weirdly, can't "SELECT * FROM A_Index". In all honesty, most DBMSes have some sort of "hinting" mechanism that accomplishes roughly the same. It's a cludge, though, usually in the form of specially formatted comments or some sort of syntactic "piggy-back" on top of the regular SQL, or even outside SQL (e.g. SQL Server plan guides). I'd love to be able to specify the physical access path with more "first-class" syntax, and mix-and-match with logical access more easily.