Snow Giraffe Tech

The ar-extensions plugin extends ActiveRecord to help developers scale, optimize, and customize Rails interaction with the database. New ar-extensions is the ability to fine tune queries by specifying MySQL database options from ActiveRecord find and save methods.

Although plugins exist to force :select and :include to play nice with ActiveRecord::Base.find, using this approach does not always yield the best performance. The post discusses when to use eager loading and when to use other approaches and the plugins that will help you.

eload-select plugin. Allowing :select to play nice with :include for Ruby on Rails ActiveRecord finders.