Vishal Gupta's Blog

In case you wanted to know which Oracle version a particular SQL hint is applicable in or was introduced in. You can query V$SQL_HINT introduced in 11g for that. It holds even historical information. Column “version” gives oracle version in which a particular hint was introduced and version_outline probably gives upto which version upto which it is applicable.

[Update:2009-05-03 : Jonathan Lewis mentioned in a email to me that version_outline gives version in which a particular hint can be used in an outline. ]

This even has a column to give you inverse of an hint.

This view is a undocumented view.

SQL> desc v$sql_hint
Name                                      Null?    Type
----------------------------------------- -------- ----------------------------
NAME                                               VARCHAR2(64)
SQL_FEATURE                                        VARCHAR2(64)
CLASS                                              VARCHAR2(64)
INVERSE                                            VARCHAR2(64)
TARGET_LEVEL                                       NUMBER
PROPERTY                                           NUMBER
VERSION                                            VARCHAR2(25)
VERSION_OUTLINE                                    VARCHAR2(25)