> Hints are an extreme measure. You're basically saying that you know better than the query planner Absolutely. A query planner does not analyze the complete

> Hints are an extreme measure. You're basically saying that you know better than the query planner Absolutely. A query planner does not analyze the complete and precise solution space, none of them do. The query planner will be extremely wrong sometimes. The only logical solution is to provide a mechanism to guide the planner towards the correct solution. I've worked with DB2, Oracle and MS SQL Server over the last 3 decades and the story is always the same, the planner is not perfect.