More Hints to Take a look in Detail!

 

 

Group Hints - like HASH GROUP, make some influence in group by operations (dahhh)

 

Union -- look for MERGE UNION

MAXDOP - nothing to do about dopping (ha ha ha), but have influence on paralelism for queries. IS VERY useful sometimes.. i remember when i was a consultant, when we got a problem that for no reason the thing just don't work,  always the PSS from microsoft say to put MAXDOP(0) in order to disable the paralelism. It was a long time ago in a Galaxy far far away...

 

EXPAND VIEWS:  is useful when you are running queries in conjunction with indexed views (resource only available on enterprise edition)

 

INDEX - You can force indexes. but remember, if you force a plan an forget it on a application that plan might be good on a given situation but databases are dynamic, so your plan might be bad in another situation of your db, so be careful. in fact, the problem of forcning is inherent to any optimizer hint...