What are alternatives to find_by_sql for computationaly-heavy queries?

Question

Our company loves reports that calculate obscure metrics--metrics that cannot be calculated with ActiveRecord's finders (except find_by_sql) and where ruport's ruby-based capabilities are just too slow.

Is there a plugin or gem or db adapter out there that will do large calculations in the database layer? What's your solution to creating intricate reports?

Answer 1

Although not database agnostic, our solution is plpgsql functions where it becomes really slow to use Ruby and ActiveRecord.

Answer 2

Thoughtbot's Squirrel plugin adds a lot of Ruby-ish functionality to ActiveRecord's find method, with multi-layered conditionals, ranges, and nested model associations:

www.thoughtbot.com/projects/squirrel/