I've had the opposite problem. In a system I've been working on a lot, I know exactly what indices I want used in what order to read the data. Admittedly the da

I've had the opposite problem. In a system I've been working on a lot, I know exactly what indices I want used in what order to read the data. Admittedly the database often figures that out first time, but sometimes it doesn't, then I have to go through an infuriating process of changing parameters or tweaking the query into a mathematically equivalent form until it guesses what I want. In one case I was even forced to write a procedural loop in PL/pgSQL (yes, I'm fully aware this is an antipattern). I don't want to give hints to the optimiser. I want to specify precisely how the data will be read and joined. I appreciate this is this is the exception rather than the rule compared to how most developers would prefer to work. And this system is a bit unusual in that it's using a database for passing messages, which it isn't well suited for (especially not the way they're storing the messages.)