If the DB can't guess up a good query plan, why not let me simply feed one to it? You speak like good databases wont allow you to override the query-optimizer.

If the DB can't guess up a good query plan, why not let me simply feed one to it? You speak like good databases wont allow you to override the query-optimizer. Look up optimizer hints. Most real database-systems worth using allows this, but it is discouraged because for most queries, most of the times, the statistics the DB has on existing indexes, data uniqueness, estimated size of result-sets etc etc provides a better basis for optimizing the query than anything you can come up with.