Give Me a Hint – How were These Autotrace Execution Statistics Achieved?

June 27, 2011 I recently received an email asking why different performance is achieved when a FIRST_ROWS hint, FIRST_ROWS(100) hint, and an unhinted version of the query are executed.  This seems to be a simple problem, yet it might also be an interesting problem.  I thought that it might be helpful to transform my response into a blog article (allowing the [...]