User-supplied hints on join equality conditions

Users can specify a join algorithm preference that does not affect every join in the query.

Simple equality join predicates can be tagged with a predicate hint that allows a join preference to be specified for just that one join. If the same join has more than one join condition with a local join preference, and if those hints are not the same value, then all local preferences are ignored for that join. Local join preferences do not affect the join order chosen by the optimizer.

The following example requests a hash join:

AND (T.X = 10 * R.x, 'J:4')