Use the PlanExporter tool to export query plan data for further analysis.
The query plan data can be exported in a variety of formats:
By using this tool, you can avoid querying XPLAIN style tables to get a basic idea of the query plan followed by the optimizer.
You can specify other query plan export formats by specifying an appropriate XSL stylesheet to transform the query plan data, or you can export the query plan data as XML, then reformat it as appropriate using any external XML-aware tool of your choice.