> At least Oracle folks had enough at some point and introduced an "optimizer_ignore_hints" parameter [1], so all legacy hints that were added 20 years ago just

> At least Oracle folks had enough at some point and introduced an "optimizer_ignore_hints" parameter [1], so all legacy hints that were added 20 years ago just get ignored - and the modern optimizer does a much better job getting things right. I think the general attitude in the Postgres community is been from a purist point of view. When you have a codebase around 40 years old, you do have to think carefully about what you put into it, as it might not be that easy to take it out again. However, yes, I do think hints would be useful for Postgres, providing they're done well. It would be good to at least have something to assist with selectivity estimations. Those are at least not directly forcing the planner into a single choice. New planner/executor smarts, such as something like Memoize added in PG14 could still be considered after upgrading an older pre-PG14 application with such hints, but perhaps not if the hint told the planner that it must nested loop join these two tables.