How do I override django.db.backends logging to work when DEBUG=False?

In django's LOGGING configuration for the builtin django.db.backends it states that: "For performance reasons, SQL logging is only enabled when settings.DEBUG is set to True, regardless of the logging level or handlers that are installed."

As a result the following LOGGING configuration, which is correctly set up to issue debug level logs showing DB queries, will NOT output the messages I need:


DEBUG = False
LOGGING = {
    "version": 1,
    "disable_existing_loggers": True,
    "root": {"handlers": [ "gcp_structured_logging"]},
    "handlers": {
        "gcp_structured_logging": {
            "level": "DEBUG",
            "class": "django_gcp.logging.GoogleStructuredLogsHandler",
        }
    },
    "loggers": {
        'django.db.backends': {
            'handlers': ["gcp_structured_logging"],
            'level': 'DEBUG',
            'propagate': True,
        },
    },
}

This is preventing me from activating this logging in production, where of course I'm not going to durn on DEBUG=True in my settings but where I need to log exactly this information.

Ironically, I need this in order to debug a performance issue (I plan to run this for a short time in production and cat my logs so I can set up a realistic scenario for a load test and some benchmarking on the database).

How can I override django's override so that sql queries get logged as I intend?

NOTE willeM_ Van Onsem's answer as accepted is correct (because it totally is) but it's worth noting that in the end, I came across a library called django-silk. Whilst not an answer to this question directly, silk actually covers the capability I was trying to build for myself when I found this peculiarity of how the db logging works. Perhaps someone else trying to achieve the same thing will make good use of it.

Solution

Fortunately we can override this. Indeed, by setting the .force_debug_cursor of the connection to True, for example in one of the AppConfigs (any app config) exists:

# my_app/apps.py

from django.apps import AppConfig
from django.db import connection


class MyAppConfig(AppConfig):
    name = 'my_app'

    def ready(self):
        connection.force_debug_cursor = True

This works because Django decides whether to log with ^[GitHub]:

@property
def queries_logged(self):
    return self.force_debug_cursor or settings.DEBUG

Another option is to work with the CaptureQueriesContext ^[GitHub], this is a context processor that sets .force_debug_cursor to true in the scope of the context. So if you know where to look for the slow query, you can use:

from django.db import connection
from django.test.utils import 

with CaptureQueriesContext(connection):
    list(MyModel.objects.all())  # sample query