Csaba,
I guess the angle is: I, as a practicing DBA would like to be able to experiment and get most out of the imperfect tool I have, and you, the developers, want to make the tool perfect... I don't care about perfect tools, it just have to do the job... hints or anything else, if I can make it work GOOD ENOUGH, it's all fine. And hints is something I would understand and be able to use.
Hmmm, if you already understand Visual Basic syntax, should we support that too? Or maybe we should support MySQL's use of '0000-00-00' as the "zero" date because people "understand" that?
We're just not going to adopt a bad design because Oracle DBAs are used to it. If we wanted to do that, we could shut down the project and join a proprietary DB staff.
The current discussion is: a) Planner tweaking is sometimes necessary; b) Oracle HINTS are a bad design for planner tweaking; c) Can we come up with a good design for planner tweaking? So, how about suggestions for a good design? --Josh Berkus
