Yes hints are evil, because they circumvent the entire beauty of runtime query optimizers. However if you really do know whats best and know that your query optimizer really does not know whats best, even if you make sure the table stats etc are all in order you can decide that "hardcoding" the query execution plan is best.

There was a brief discussion on adding ways to hint selectivity in #postgresql this morning. Often the database has trouble figuring out a proper plan for a given query. One solution to this problem is to let the RDBMS analyze the data in the table. But even that falls flat in some situations, even if it has reasonably up to date table stats. Maybe the effort is just too high to make it worthwhile to figure things out at runtime.

I recently picked up two O'Reilly books for $20 each: "High Performance MySQL" and "SQL Tuning". I am almost done with "High Performance MySQL". Overall I would say it’s a good book. Not suprising from the original publication date it is focused on MySQL 4.1 and therefore does not cover a lot of the advances made with MySQL 5. Especially replication comes to mind, but also little things like index usage for MIN() and MAX(). It does however contain a few notes here and there about changes/enhancements to expect with MySQL 5.

I have been following the various wishlist items for PHP6 with quite some personal interest. I even compiled all the wishlist items I saw on mailinglists, on IRC or that were brought up at conferences and put it online. Much of these items made it on the agenda at the recent PHP6 core developer meeting in Paris.

I am not interest in your software patent pledges. I want you to freaken burn them, I want you to freaken stop lobbying for this crap and I want you instead to lobby to ban their very existence. So I am very much in agreement with Florian Müller's (who has been working hard in cooperation with MySQL to prevent a legitimization of software patents in Europe) assessment of the state of affairs.