Comment by SigmundA

>I've actually come around to the Postgres way of thinking. We shouldn't want or need plan hints usually.

They only come out at night, mostly.

PG is 40 years old and still has planner bugs being fixed up regularly, and having no control and waiting for a new version when a hint could fix the issue at runtime is an obvious problem that should have been addressed long ago.

It's great the devs want to make the planner perfect and strive for that, it is an unattainable goal worth pursuing IMO. Escape hatches are required hence the very popular pg_hint_plan extension.

But in the end after many years of dealing with these things I have come to the opposite conclusion, let the query language drive the plan more directly and senior devs can fix juniors devs mistakes in the apps source code and the plans will be committed in source control for all to see and reference going forward.

SQL comes from an idea of non technical people querying a system in ad-hoc ways, still useful, but if you are technically competent in data structures and programming and making an application that uses the db, the planner just gets in your way at least in my experience.