Show generated SQL in Rails 3 console

Have you ever wanted to see the resulting SQL of a query in Rails console? Well, unfortunately there's not really an 'easy' way to do this, other than hacking the console, so here we go.

Fire up your Rails console. I'm using Rails 3, but this should would in <3:

$ rails c
Loading development environment (Rails 3.0.7)
>> _

Cool, awesome, great. Now, we need to tell Rails console that we want to show what's being logged:

$ rails c
Loading development environment (Rails 3.0.7)
>> ActiveRecord::Base.logger = Logger.new(STDOUT)

We are creating a new instance of the ActiveRecord::Base#logger class. Normally, you would specify this as a file (for example, if you were performing an AR operation that you wanted to log separately from Application logs):

ActiveRecord::Base.logger = Logger.new('./logs/custom_log.log')

But in this case, we are simply "writing" to STDOUT. Now, when you run a query, you should see the supplemental query just as if you were viewing your development server logs!