> Also given Amazon AWS support it for Aurora, I feel like it's not -that- hobby-ish. Oh, didn't know that :) About the rest: sure, I can agree as well about

> Also given Amazon AWS support it for Aurora, I feel like it's not -that- hobby-ish. Oh, didn't know that :) About the rest: sure, I can agree as well about the indirect adverse effect of having them available (e.g. easy to misuse them as I saw in some apps using Oracle DBs), and it's for sure wrong to insult somebody because of this. Still, personally, I think that the pros would outweight the cons of having that embedded in the app. On one hand I remember some nights spent in the past trying to make some SQL work, hints were always at least a good temporary workaround. On the other hand there will always be some SQL which confuse the optimizer (or more special cases about a lot of data changing distribution of values, etc..) and hints would be the only way to cover these cases. Maybe an interesting question is on which level should hints act? I know mainly only Oracle & MariaDB, therefore I know hints of the type "use that index"/"query tables in this order"/"join these tables with this join type"/etc..., which are probably low-level hints. Maybe already just higher-level hints of the type "most important selectivity criteria comes from inline-view X"/"I want just the first row of the result"/"take into account only plans which select data by using indexes"/etc... would be as well interesting, not sure, just dumping here my thoughts.