I agree with paragraph three. A hint is a directive. Now we are stuck with it. Bad stuff can ensue...maybe. But, maybe my customer is pissed now. Total cost to fix: a couple hours.
If I had the budget and developers to make PostgreSQL as performant as Oracle, I would be living on an island next to Larry.
I wasn't really trying to be that much of a smartass. When you read the parent article and a couple of others that have been posted recently dealing with replication problems; it makes you wonder if we have facts to enact sweeping societal change.
When Bill Nye starts calling for burning of the heretics:
In the face of generalized malfeasance across all domains, peoples faith in climate change will remain. Surely, that science must be the one that is correct?
RE: Oracle Replication - Have you looked at DbVisit? Compared to the PhD you need for GoldenGate, you can get by with a high school diploma with this stuff.
As a general recommendation maybe this is ok. But, unrealistic relative to the world we live in. Sometimes you need to use hints. Oracle / PostgreSQL / what have you, are not perfect nor are developers writing the SQL.
Is your customer going to wait for the next version of Oracle? Is your dev team going to fix some sev 3 performance bug?
Hints allow you to use your brain to help the optimizer. Why would you make a hard rule not to use them? Why else are they there?
If I had the budget and developers to make PostgreSQL as performant as Oracle, I would be living on an island next to Larry.