Profiling Queries

DuckDB supports profiling queries via the EXPLAIN and EXPLAIN ANALYZE statements.

EXPLAIN

To see the query plan of a query without executing it, run:

EXPLAIN query;

The output of EXPLAIN contains the estimated cardinalities for each operator.

EXPLAIN ANALYZE

To profile a query, run:

EXPLAIN ANALYZE query;

The EXPLAIN ANALYZE statement runs the query, and shows the actual cardinalities for each operator, as well as the cumulative wall-clock time spent in each operator.