Why PostgreSQL doesn't have query hints 15 years ago
What arrogance. Perfect optimizers are an illusion. They are guaranteed to fail and to fail at the most inconvenient times. It is not only possible to do better than the optimizer on complex queries with hints its a given. Now that I know hints are not possible in PostgreSQL I will strictly curtail the kind of projects I will apply this RDBMS to. If you haven't found the need to use hints you have not explored the full range of what SQL is capable of (or worse yet use an ORM).