Guidelines for Usage of User-Supplied Condition Hints

Condition hints are generally appropriate only within frequently run queries.

Only advanced users should experiment with condition hints. The optimizer generally makes optimal decisions, except where it cannot infer accurate information about a condition from the available indexes.

The optimizer often rewrites or simplifies the original conditions, and it also infers new conditions from the original conditions. Condition hints are not carried through new to conditions inferred by the optimizer, nor are they carried through to simplified conditions.

Related concepts
User-Supplied Condition Selectivity
User-Supplied Condition Hint Strings
User-Supplied Hints on Join Equality Conditions