How to EXPLAIN statements inside a trigger function?

["John D. Burger" <john@xxxxxxxxx>]

I'm developing some triggers for the first time, and I'm having  
trouble analyzing their performance.  Does anyone have any advice for  
doing EXPLAIN and the like on statements involving NEW?  For  
instance, I'd like to know what plan PG is coming up with for this  
fragment of a trigger function in PLPGSQL:

insert into allSenseRelationPaths (sensePath, weight)
select array[NEW.sense1ID] || p.sensePath, NEW.weight + p.weight
    from allSenseRelationPaths as p
  where (NEW.sense2ID = p.sensePath[1])
  and not NEW.sense1ID = any (sensePath)
  and NEW.weight + p.weight > minWeight
  and not exists (select 1 from allSenseRelationPaths as EXISTING
                    where EXISTING.sensepath = array[NEW.sense1ID]  
|| p.sensePath)
  ;

The details of this don't matter much, but there is, of course, a NEW  
record, as well as a local variable, minWeight.  I can't just  
EXPLAIN ... this in psql.  I've tried constructing a regular function  
as a jig, which sets up the variables, but I can't figure out how to  
get EXPLAIN output out of that function.  I've seen this:

http://people.planetpostgresql.org/greg/index.php?/archives/106- 
Putting-EXPLAIN-results-into-a-table.html

but that seems a bit heavyweight.  Surely others have wondered what  
plans their triggers are using, how do you do this?

Thanks for any help.

- John Burger
  MITRE

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