I was working on some code today where I was getting back a query object from a CFC and needed to get the execution time. You can get this information from the <cfquery /> tag by using the result attribute, but since I was getting my query object back from a CFC, I needed to try and determine the execution time from only the query object.
Since the <cfdump /> tag is outputs additional meta data about a query (including the executionTime,) I knew this information could be obtained if I could just find the correct internal Java methods to call. After playing around for a few minutes I discovered that the additional struct keys that ColdFusion 8's <cfdump /> tag outputs come from: query.getMetaData().getExtendedMetaData().
So, to grab the execution time of any query in your code, you can just use:
Since I was using this information on a search results page, I wanted to show the execution time in seconds to the user (carried out to the 3rd decimal.) Because query's can often return a 0ms execution time (either because of timing issues on Windows or due to cached queries,) I came up with the following code to show the execution time in seconds. I use the min() function to at least show a 1ms execution time (since 0ms time just looks weird.)
The obvious disclaimer here is that since we're using internal methods, this can change in future versions of ColdFusion—which means your code could break.