I've actually never used ActiveRecord myself, but when an ORM breaks down and it becomes hard to make certain queries I've had good luck with other ORMs by crea

I've actually never used ActiveRecord myself, but when an ORM breaks down and it becomes hard to make certain queries I've had good luck with other ORMs by creating a view in the database and telling the ORM that it's a table. Obviously you can't insert into arbitrary views, but most are happy to give you an object back, with appropriate relationships to the actual database-writable objects. I'm surprised there isn't more explicit support for this in more ORMs (things like not having 'save' methods on the ORMed classes).