It's just possible that if you gave the critical subquery a qb_name (or worked out the name that Oracle had given it - which would be something like sel$5) then referencing the objects with their query block names would be sufficient to make the hint valid. It's not a proper solution, though. Regards Jonathan Lewis http://jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/all-postings Author: Oracle Core (Apress 2011) http://www.apress.com/9781430239543 ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jonathan Lewis" <jonathan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: "'ORACLE-L'" <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Saturday, September 14, 2013 6:47 AM Subject: Re: Optimizer ignoring hints | | Your hints "leading" and "use_nl" hints are invalid - they refer to objects | that aren't in the query block where you've put the hint (and because of | the nature of the leading hint you can't put it into the query block that | is going to be unnested to make it possible for flv to be the leading table | in the join order). | -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l