I think Oracle style hints are not a good thing to have - especially because you have to change the query itself which sometimes isn't possible in a production

I think Oracle style hints are not a good thing to have - especially because you have to change the query itself which sometimes isn't possible in a production environment. Additionally, for me they quite frequently made things worse after minor Oracle upgrades. I would prefer having "externally attached" hints for a query (e.g. identified by it's queryid) like Oracle's stored outlines.