I agree - it's probably not nice/elegant/whatever to use hints, but my opinion is that a query planner cannot probably cover 100% of all possible combinations o

I agree - it's probably not nice/elegant/whatever to use hints, but my opinion is that a query planner cannot probably cover 100% of all possible combinations of layouts/queries/data => not having the possibility to use hints is for me just a huge risk. Additionally in PROD environments you have the "time"-factor about fixing something; often you cannot afford a week of deep analysis trying to understand why the planner does not work as expected respectively what changed about the data that made it think in a different way etc... . Having said this, I just installed PostgreSQL last week, hehe. I did it only after somebody on HN mentioned the extension "pg_hint_plan" ( https://pghintplan.osdn.jp/pg_hint_plan.html https://pghintplan.osdn.jp/pg_hint_plan.html + https://pghintplan.osdn.jp/hint_list.html https://pghintplan.osdn.jp/hint_list.html ) => downloaded & built & installed it on Debian 10 for PostgreSQL 13 => it seems to work (but so far I did only few initial tests). But it's still a bit a risk as it's an external dependency.