search for: my_company

...f you don''t actually need the records. You could write a complete_videos_count method, but it doesn''t feel very DRY to have two methods every time you want to do a count query as well. With count_from_query, it''s cake videos_count = ActiveRecord::Base.count_from_query { my_company.complete_videos } You can wrap any AR find call in count_from_query to have it be converted into a count query. Association proxies work the same way. We could change the complete_videos definition to be class Company < ActiveRecord::Base def complete_videos videos.find :all, :conditions =&gt...