I was reading my iPhone OS 3.0 documentation and it mentions using
-com.apple.CoreData.SQLDebug 1
as an argument to the app to provide Core Data debug information. It actually only works if you're targeting OS 3.1 and up, and figuring that out consumed many hours as I tend to target OS 3.0 as a baseline.
But now I can get back to what I set out to do a day ago - make this app really fast!