How can I see the SQL that will be generated by a given ActiveRecord query in Ruby on Rails

Similar to penger’s, but works anytime in the console even after classes have been loaded and the logger has been cached:

For Rails 2:

ActiveRecord::Base.connection.instance_variable_set :@logger, Logger.new(STDOUT)

For Rails 3.0.x:

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

For Rails >= 3.1.0 this is already done by default in consoles. In case it’s too noisy and you want to turn it off you can do:

ActiveRecord::Base.logger = nil