I’ve spent so many years trying to explain that a “hint” to the Oracle optimizer is an order – if you know how to do it properly – that I finally decided to list the manual references that have made this point over the last 15 or so years. Here’s the list, which ends with a surprising change of flavour. (Emphasis in the body of the text is mine).
Using Hints
As an application designer, you may know information about your data that the optimizer does not know. For example, you may know that a certain index is more selective for certain queries. Based on this information, you may be able to choose a more efficient execution plan than the optimizer. In such a case, use hints to forcethe optimizer to use the optimal execution plan.
