> Is there a plausible way to improve this? Yes. There are techniques in high end RDBMS like adaptive query processing which allow for the engine to update its

> Is there a plausible way to improve this? Yes. There are techniques in high end RDBMS like adaptive query processing which allow for the engine to update its approach during execution. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/performance/joins?view=sql-server-ver17#adaptive https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/p... https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/i/7.6.0?topic=overview-adaptive-query-processing https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/i/7.6.0?topic=overview-adaptive-... https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/features/r/dbfeatures/features?feature_id=344 https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/features/r/dbfeatures/featu...