FINALLY!

I never understood the issues PG had with hints. Running a non-trivial DB with a non-trivial schema and scale is, well, non-trivial at all. At some point the DB stops being a black box and starts being a tool that you have to know inside and out to avoid performance issues.

>The optimizer is usually smarter than you think.

Except for when it isn't, and moves heavy calculation inside a nested loop inside a nested loop to avoid an index scan. Nothing is perfect.