But for those cases where you are just pulling a row or two, this is a nice technique. It hints at something more interesting, I think. Fundamentally it wants

But for those cases where you are just pulling a row or two, this is a nice technique. It hints at something more interesting, I think. Fundamentally it wants to be an assertion against the schema. It would be better to be able to ask the database about the worst-case complexity of a particular query, then write assertions against that. (I don't think this is the same as 'explain', it's more like 'explain as if' with some structure behind it) Something like: assertEqual( O(log(n)), schema.worstCaseComplexityOf('SELECT text FROM response WHERE questionId = 27 AND participantId = 38')) Even better would be a schema language that lets you build in these assertions directly. This is really something you should be thinking about while designing the schema, after all.