The title is the name of an Oracle hint that came into existence in Oracle 10.2.0.3 and made an appearance recently in a question on the rarely used“My Oracle Support” Community forum (you’ll need a MOS account to be able to read the original). I wouldn’t have found it but the author also emailed me the link asking if I could take a look at it. (If you want to ask me for help – without paying me, that is – then posting a public question in the Oracle (ODC) General Database or SQL forums and emailing me a private link is the strategy most likely to get an answer, by the way.)
The question was about a very simple query using a straightforward index – with a quirky change of plan after upgrading from 10.2.0.3 to 12.2.0.1. Setting the optimizer_features_enable to ‘10.2.0.3’ in the 12.2.0.1 system re-introduced the 10g execution plan. Here’s the query: