Yep, when the app code and the schema/partitioning/index design works _with_ the database as intended, not _against_ the database engine’s intended use, a whole

Yep, when the app code and the schema/partitioning/index design works _with_ the database as intended, not _against_ the database engine’s intended use, a whole class of SQL performance and plan stability problems tends to go away. Yep, agreed, hints should be temporary workarounds (or just experimentation aid when developing/testing SQL performance to validate some hypothesis). But many of these temporary workarounds end up being permanent temporary workarounds :-) That’s why Oracle now has hints and parameters to make the optimizer ignore all other hints in the SQL code :-)