When you write rather complex SQL for Oracle, sooner or later you will have to apply the odd execution hint because Oracle can't seem to figure out the "best" execution plan itself.
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/server.102/b14211/hintsref.htm
Now this is certainly not a SQL standard. But still, I'm wondering, are there any other RDBMS that support these kinds of hints, and I really mean hints that are "embedded" in SQL? Are they similar, syntactically (i.e. also placed between the SELECTkeyword and the first selected COLUMN)? Do you know of a general documentation page comparing hints in various RDBMS?
N.B: I'm mostly interested in these RDBMS: Postgres, MySQL, HSQLDB, H2, Derby, SQLite, DB2, Sybase, SQL Server
I know that in db2 the plans are made fixed in some way, not how. In Oracle 11g there are other options besides adding hints to queries. These are SQLProfiles and SQLPlan Baselines, both very powerful. I just finished a performance tuning project where we did not add even a single hint to the code, on the contrary.