Programming

Write a function or macro so you can reuse them. The project I work on has dozens of debug assisting code paths. Here are two examples: normally when talking to the db you'll call run($sql, $boundVariables) on a handle. Alternatively you can call debug($sql, $boundVariables) to have the handle run the query normally then rerun the query prefixed with EXPLAIN (blah,blah) to get the execution plan. We also have assembleEmulatedQuery($sql, $boundVariables) which will manually replace all the binding tokens in the SQL with their values, do some string escaping and return a big honking string that you can dump into the database... that last one is useful for performance tuning since it can be used to easily capture expensive query forms. Also - assembleEmulatedQuery will throw an exception on our production environment because it's unsafe due to the potential of SQL Injection.

Build debugging functions and add tests over them - future you will thank you!