Earlier quoted context omitted.
He’s basically just asking for SQL without the query planner because it’s obnoxious and how often do you have unconstrained arbitrary queries hitting the database that you don’t have the chance to vet anyways? The database is hidden behind applications 100% of the time; why is this a predominant design use case KVs give you this behavior, they just drop everything else with it
You usually want a query planner, else you'll end up writing a query planner yourself to produce efficient queries. What is sometimes needed is query plan stability , lack of surprises, and influencing the planner. This is very attainable in the existing SQL databases and is a core feature of the older ones, like Oracle.
For proper data warehouses with multiple applications talking to it, planning is probably more useful than not. For the common modern situation with small/medium sized applications with a 1:1 relationship to their database, I’ve found it fairly rare that my data distribution changes significantly over time — and where it does, a lot more work needs to happen around it anyways.
Hints are the effective solution but they’re opt-in, weird non-standard extensions to the language and intrinsically tied to the planning engine; the big issue though is that they mainly exist to coerce/override the heuristics, which mainly fall over because planners are built to re-execute on every query with no real time to optimize/explore properly (you’ll give a C++ codebase hours to explore, but the RDBMS is granted mere milliseconds — a great injustice)