Jonathan Lewis on how to hint

With this post Jonathan shares a recent example of how hinting can not work, go horribly wrong, and what you need to be doing in order to resolve the issue by addressing not just 1 hint but several in order to have the CBO actually do what you want it to be doing.  This also has a link to an article by him on SQL Baselines which starts a very interesting discussion in the comments of the post on if you should manually code in the hints (with comments of course) or introduce SQL Baselines instead.  I lean towards the code updates, because having it available to us visually when there is a problem instead of having another step of checking for SQL Baselines is potentially a better avenue since it would be easy for us to forget about that step and be spinning our wheels for hours.