OPT_PARAM in-line hinting

As I learn more about writing SQL queries and system parameters, every so often I'll come back to some old blog posts from other authors.  This type of review allows me to get a handle on something that I didn't understand at first, and then share it with you after that.  Tim Hall created this post about a badly performing query throwing ORA-00600 errors, and the suggestion was to alter a system parameter for the session, but instead he chose to actually use the OPT_PARAM hint within the SQL query.  I thought it was smart enough to save for later and I suggest you read the article, and the other post that he linked within as well.