Re: Navigation vs Relational operators

Speaking of suggesting index usage to the DBMS reminds me of Oracle's "hints". I've run into a few people who think that the really cool Oracle people use "hints" all the time.

What those people tend not to realize is that the overuse of hints is a symptom of a defect: bad query design, bad index design, bad table design, and/or a defect in the optimizer.

People who use hints all the time remind me of people who use a programming language, but are little hazy on the syntax and semantics of the language itself. But they are real whizzes with the interactive debugger! I went through a phase like that myself, when I was young. Received on Mon May 17 2004 - 08:57:01 CDT