Organizing the Index Design Process - Relational Database Index Design and the Optimizers - page 292

Note2
In steps 2 to 5, the specification of the database processing must include the same
information as the corresponding SQL statements, but the formulation of the SQL
(e.g., join or subquery) is not required. At this point one should assume that the
optimizer will choose (or can be made to choose) the assumed access path.