I have three tables (A, B and C) and associated ActiveRecords. A has a one to many relationship with B (A has_many B, B belongs_to A). B has a many to one relationship with C (B has_many C, C belongs_to A). I want to be able to find records in B by various criteria and return both the single associated record in A as well as some aggregate (min, max, count, etc) calculations of the associated C records. At the moment, I am using find_by_sql to do a custom group-by query returing all the attributes of B, the aggregate calculations on C and the attributes of interest of A. The trouble with this approach is when accessing the ''a'' attribute of a returned B record (link to the A record), ActiveRecord does a further find by primary key on A to instantiate the related record. This causes a severe performance problem when displaying lists of the records found in the query. What''s the best way to deal with this sort of problem with ActiveRecord? Is there some way I can do a find with an :include to get the parent A record and still specify my custom calculations on the child C records? Thanks, Phil