Client or server side? (I guess maybe the oracle side &quot;hints&quot; have another name, but my Oracle-Foo is not strong enough to remember the name query plan?).  I have seen some really big shops that the only way they could keep their app running in production was a fair bit of server side hints.  Which then really sucked because someone fixed the casing on a table name (say &quot;Orders&quot; to &quot;orders&quot;) and made it fall out of the query plan. Whereas if they were done as hints, they would have kept working.