I'll take consistent data access performance characteristics, thank you very much. And if the distribution of your data changes, or you move the application to

I'll take consistent data access performance characteristics, thank you very much. And if the distribution of your data changes, or you move the application to a new machine? Hard-coding a particular data access strategy into your application logic is like hard-coding assumptions about the distribution of your data and the relative costs of various operations. That's not necessarily the wrong choice, but it isn't a panacea, either. (If you're that concerned about query plan stability, many DBs give you the ability to force the optimizer to choose a particular query plan.)