Support a flag to disabe hint validations

[apstndb]

I’d like to submit a feature request for a flag to disable hint validation.

Problem

There is always a lag between cloud-spanner-emulator and real Spanner instances in terms of supported query hints, and this can become an obstacle to adopting hints.

The Spanner emulator does not support real Spanner query plans, so the practical benefit of hint validation in the emulator is limited, except for a few hints such as FORCE_INDEX, where it can verify the existence of an index.

Similar to -disable_query_null_filtered_index_check, I would like the emulator to provide a startup flag to disable hint validation. For example, something like -disable_hint_validation or -ignore_unknown_hints.

FYI

• Support all documented query hints #300 appears to have been closed while still unresolved. I hope support for currently unsupported hints will continue to be improved as well.

[apstndb]

https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/cloud-spanner-emulator/releases/tag/v1.5.55

Add support for spanner_emulator.ignore_unknown_hints query hint [https://github.com//issues/349].

I noticed that the spanner_emulator.ignore_unknown_hints hint has been added, but it is not a startup flag. I would prefer not to add hints to many queries. Would it be possible to support a flag such as -ignore_unknown_hints, similar to -disable_query_null_filtered_index_check?