I think I may have either stumbled onto a documentation issue, or an situation where MariaDB simply ignores a directive, or even uses it. The other day, I ran a query as follows:

UPDATE some_table FORCE INDEX (some_index) SET some_column='some value' WHERE another_column > some_value;

The issue is, the query ran just fine, and did not complain about the FORCE INDEX. So, I went on to search the documentation and low and behold "FORCE INDEX" did not appear to be documented (or glasses are needed).

If would be nice if DELETE queries could use a FORCE INDEX directive as well. With the recent optimization problems, I think this might not be a bad idea.

This to me seems like a feature request, but for the life of me, JIRA has my head spinning, so I thought I would log it here.