Yeah, thanks. I get all that; avoid if possible any proprietary languange constructs.Try to tune the query and the schema so that no sane optimizer would do the

Yeah, thanks. I get all that; avoid if possible any proprietary languange constructs.Try to tune the query and the schema so that no sane optimizer would do the wrong thing. But the last time I tangled with Oracle, I was working for a bank; schema changes took months to approve, and the DBAs were GHODZ. And there was no chance of the bank changing suppliers anytime soon. And anyway, EVERYTHING was proprietary. They had their own proprietary stored-procedure language, and it wasn't dispensable - I believe people bought Oracle because of their stored procedure setup. To be clear, I'm not in any sense advocating hinted SQL!