Re: Hints in Practice

From: Bob Jones <email_at_me.not>
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2006 00:41:57 GMT
Message-ID: <pvNGg.16860$gY6.16739@newssvr11.news.prodigy.com>

"Robert Klemme" <shortcutter_at_googlemail.com> wrote in message news:4l0scsFe4upiU1_at_individual.net...
>
> All,
>
> from what I read and from my limited personal experience, hints are
> superfluous most of the time. The general recommendation seems to be
> "make sure your schema is properly done, create appropriate indexes, make
> sure statistics are up to date and let the CBO do its work". Hints seem
> to be useful only in very rare cases (bugs?) where the CBO doesn't come up
> with an appropriate plan. Is this a correct summary of the situation or
> did I miss something?
>
> Thanks
>
> robert

That is correct. Oracle is about the only database I know uses explicit hints. That is not really a vote of confidence in their optimizer.

I would do anything to avoid using those hints. They are not portable and do not conform to any standard. It is almost always possible to build good performing queries without hints. Received on Tue Aug 22 2006 - 19:41:57 CDT