stored procedure performance

[Rick Gigger <rick@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have a table that I populate with a stored procedure.  When the  
stored procedure runs it deletes the table and rebuilds the whole  
thing from scratch.  Initially it performs terribly but when I play  
around with it for a while (I will describe this in a moment) it runs  
very, very fast.

If I understand correctly when the stored procedure is first created  
it creates query plans for each of the queries in the stored  
procedure and caches them.  I don't know what order loading the dump  
does everything in but I'm guessing that when the stored proc is  
created the stats (or lack of stats) present at that time are causing  
it to create bad query plans.

So I have two questions:

1) How can I verify this?  Is there any way to do an explain on  
something running in a stored procedure?  (I am using pl/pgsql)
2) What can I do about it?  What actually fixes it is to run it a  
while and made sure there is a bunch of data there (even if it is  
deleted and not visible to anything) and run vacuum analyze.  Then  
recreate the stored procedure.  Then run the stored procedure.  Then  
it goes very, very fast.  So my only option now is to create the  
database from the dump and then fix the stored proc manually.  I  
guess I could run a script to do this.  Is there a way that I can  
delay the creation of query plans till the database has some actual  
data available to it to actually create good plans?