How to see MySQL queries in rails console

Yes, this can be achieved through redirecting rails log to standard output.

Write these in your console prompt:

ActiveRecord::Base.logger = Logger.new(STDOUT)
ActiveRecord::Base.connection_pool.clear_reloadable_connections!

Furthermore, you can put these lines in ~/.irbrc file, so that each time you don't need to manually write these 2 lines:

require 'rubygems'

if ENV.include?('RAILS_ENV') && ENV["RAILS_ENV"] == 'development'
    ActiveRecord::Base.logger = Logger.new(STDOUT)
    ActiveRecord::Base.connection_pool.clear_reloadable_connections!
end

Hope this helps...

In Rails 3+ you can use ActiveRecord::Relation’s to_sql method:

User.where(:id => 3).to_sql
#=> "SELECT \"users\".* FROM \"users\"  WHERE \"users\".\"id\" = 3"