The usual way to find out what Yii has created for an SQL query is to mutilate the SQL in the sourcecode and call the program again so that the SQL statement with errors is displayed. Or you can use the SQL logger, which must be switched on and off each time and logs all SQL statements, which leads to an enormous slowdown in program execution and decelerates your workflow.
Say, you want to write a test for a component which provides a caching feature. How would you know, that some method of your component returns a cached result? With the solution described here you can inspect all log outputs. So you could search the logs for accesses to the DB to really make sure, that the result was served from cache.
I've seen a lot of people asking about the logging facilities in Yii and thought I'd share a nice little class I wrote that provides near real-time logging.
ChromePHP is a console logging extension for Google Chrome.