I was just going through my app adding eager loading to some of my associations that were doing multiple queries (out of laziness), and it occured to me that this scheme could be improved a little bit. What if the associations gained another option called perhaps :always_load, that indicated that they should be eager_loaded by default? find would need an exclude option to allow explicit exclusion of them, of course. This would make category membership (where you really are loading a tiny database object) or author loading on a post easier. This could pose difficulties if the post is being eager loaded (does it snake through and load the author, too? Probably not, but is this too much inconsistency? I don''t know enough about outer joins to comment.) Also, How difficult would it be to allow a class to specify that certain fields shouldn''t be loaded from the database on eager loads (or all loads unless explicitly enabled)? I have an image model with several thumb sizes and I never want more than one at once. Loading the large one is relatively slow and pulling all images through on a load is much worse than just pulling the thumbs through on additional queries. Right now I use custom find_by_sql to do it and it works great, but I can''t really use eager loading with the model cause I don''t want to pull a few hundred kilobytes of unneccesary image data per image, per store item. Great work on the eager loading, though. If there''s interest in this stuff, I can look into doing it myself, though a core developer would probably do a better job as my database experience is a little bit lacking. Brian