[btilly]

Oh trust me, I don't overlook that point. I've spent too much time cajoling optimizers into the query plan that I know will work when they think they know better. And I know from painful experience how much more work it is to cajole developers in the same way.

That said, there is little point discussing this subject people who clearly have no experience about how to do what a little bit of SQL does. If you're convinced that manipulating data is easy, you're not going to appreciate that manipulating data efficiently is even more tricky.