[astral303]

I remember using the Progress database, 4GL and all, and it was a painful experience.

I remember being very surprised that in mid-2000's, it didn't automatically optimize a query like "A>B and X=Y". It ended up running A>B first, which pulled in most of a huge table, instead of running X=Y, which was much narrower. I thought it was a basic query optimization heuristic to prioritize equality constraints, so I thought it was unacceptable for an enterprise SQL database in mid-2000's to not have that.

[fit2rule]

I think in Progress' 4GL, you basically had 'the power' to use ()'s to hint at your preference. I dunno though, been a looooong time (1989) since I wrote any Progress 4GL code. Been mostly a MySQL/PostgreSQL user since then, although I confess to being more inclined to NoSQL these days .. :)