can be specified
Currently MySQL allows one to specify what indexes to ignore during
join optimization. The scope of the current USE/FORCE/IGNORE INDEX 
statement is only the FROM clause, while all other clauses are not 
affected.

However, in certain cases, the optimizer
may incorrectly choose an index for sorting and/or grouping, and
produce an inefficient query plan.

This task provides the means to specify what indexes are
ignored/used for what operation in a more fine-grained manner, thus
making it possible to manually force a better plan. We do this
by extending the current IGNORE/USE/FORCE INDEX syntax to:

IGNORE/USE/FORCE INDEX [FOR {JOIN | ORDER | GROUP BY}]

so that:
- if no FOR is specified, the index hint will apply everywhere.
- if MySQL is started with the compatibility option --old_mode then
  an index hint without a FOR clause works as in 5.0 (i.e, the 
  index will only be ignored for JOINs, but can still be used to
  compute ORDER BY).

See the WL#3527 for further details.