Time to time, I like to test my ActiveRecord queries on my apps’ consoles. Play it, tweak it. Quite straightforward to do it on a Rails console.

However, there is a slight problem with this method; you cannot see the generated SQL nor how many milliseconds were spent on this query. To solve it, you need to update the ActiveRecord’s logger to log the output on standard output:

ActiveRecord::Base.logger = Logger.new(STDOUT)

This is really all you need. Now, when you run an ActiveRecord query, you will also get the SQL with load time.

If you really want to get this every time, which I don’t suggest, update your irbrc file like below:

if defined?(Rails::Console)
  ActiveRecord::Base.logger = Logger.new(STDOUT)
end

FYI, the reason why I don’t suggest is, I don’t always need to see the SQL query while playing around with models. If that’s not the case for you, definitely go for it.

• #active record
• #console
• #rails
• #sql