. Numerous structures for database query optimizers have been proposed. Many of those proposals aimed at automating the construction of query optimizers from some kind of specification of optimizer behavior. These specification frameworks do a good job of partitioning and modularizing the kinds of information needed to generate a query optimizer. Most of them represent at least part of this information in a rule-like form. Nevertheless, large portions of these specifications still take a procedural form. The contributions of this work are threefold. We present a language for specifying optimizers that captures a larger portion of the necessary information in a declarative manner. This language is in turn based on a model of query rewriting where query expressions carry annotations that are propagated during query transformation and planning. This framework is reminiscent of inherited and synthesized attributes for attribute grammars, and we believe it is expressive of a wide range of i...