Note

As of Rails 7.1+, ActiveRecord#explain now officially supports analyze options. See the docs and PR for details. This rubygem will remain available for older versions of Rails (<= 7.0).

activerecord-explain-analyze

Extends ActiveRecord#explain with support for EXPLAIN ANALYZE and output formats of JSON, XML, and YAML.

It currently has been tested to support:

• ActiveRecord versions 4 through 7
• PostgreSQL only
• Ruby 2.7.x, 3.1.x, 3.2.x, 3.3.x

What's EXPLAIN ANALYZE?

From the PostgreSQL docs:

PostgreSQL devises a query plan for each query it receives. Choosing the right plan to match the query structure and the properties of the data is absolutely critical for good performance, so the system includes a complex planner that tries to choose good plans. You can use the EXPLAIN command to see what query plan the planner creates for any query.

With EXPLAIN ANALYZE, EXPLAIN actually executes the query, and then displays the true row counts and true run time accumulated within each plan node.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile and run bundle to install:

gem 'activerecord-explain-analyze'

Example usage

Wallet.where(base_currency: "USD").explain(analyze: true)

Results in:

EXPLAIN for: SELECT "wallets".* FROM "wallets" WHERE "wallets"."deleted_at" IS NULL AND "wallets"."base_currency" = $1
Bitmap Heap Scan on public.wallets  (cost=4.16..9.50 rows=1 width=164) (actual time=0.008..0.012 rows=30 loops=1)
  Output: id, canonical_id, client_id, wallet_type, base_currency, created_at, updated_at, deleted_at
  Recheck Cond: (wallets.deleted_at IS NULL)
  Filter: ((wallets.base_currency)::text = 'USD'::text)
  Heap Blocks: exact=1
  Buffers: shared hit=2
  ->  Bitmap Index Scan on index_wallets_on_deleted_at  (cost=0.00..4.16 rows=2 width=0) (actual time=0.003..0.003 rows=32 loops=1)
        Index Cond: (wallets.deleted_at IS NULL)
        Buffers: shared hit=1
Planning time: 0.041 ms
Execution time: 0.026 ms

This can be copy-pasted into explain.depesz.com:

You can output in :json, :yaml, and :xml formats as well. Below demonstrates JSON:

Wallet.where(base_currency: "USD").explain(analyze: true, format: :json)

Results in:

[
  {
    "Plan": {
      "Node Type": "Bitmap Heap Scan",
      "Parallel Aware": false,
      "Relation Name": "wallets",
      "Schema": "public",
      "Alias": "wallets",
      "Startup Cost": 4.16,
      "Total Cost": 9.50,
      "Plan Rows": 1,
      "Plan Width": 164,
      "Actual Startup Time": 0.008,
      "Actual Total Time": 0.013,
      "Actual Rows": 30,
      ...

You can then paste this JSON output into PEV or similar tools to get a visualization of the query plan:

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.