TomBascom
Curmudgeon
My understanding (and perhaps mistakenly) always has been that given a "tie", OE will always use the index that returns the most records.
As Rob said -- do you mean least?
Is that true?
No.
You are describing something that sounds like a "cost based optimizer". The SQL-92 engine does that but it depends on the statistics about key distribution generated by UPDATE STATISTICS. The 4GL engine uses a "static optimizer" or "rules based optimizer" that selects the index at compile time. The 4GL is unlikely to ever adopt the cost based optimizer -- it would likely break a lot of applications.
Your "returns the most records" confusion might be a mis-remembering the rule that the 4GL tries to select the index with the most equality matches. That is one of the more important index selection rules (but there are conditions and caveats -- "most equality matches on leading components" is a better description of the rule).