Is there a way to retrieve columns in ActiveRecord which are not stored in the base table. I wrote a simple view which retrieves base table data and calculated data. Is there way to use this view for all retrievals. Lets take blog sample. Our User has many Posts and each Post could have many Comments. For logged on user on each page I want to show the number of his posts and the number of the comments on his posts (this is just a sample). I don''t need all this Posts and Comment on each page, I just want two numbers from the database. I could get number of comments with :counter_cache option in association. But how to get the number of comments (without getting all posts). I could get advanced attributes with find_by_sql...(rails book sample) But I want it to works with any finder. I also looked at ActiveRecord callbacks, but there is no something like after_find callback where I could hook and fill my columns. Thanks, Igor.