I think a lot of this will improve with Rails 3's new query syntax. It looks a lot like LINQ for .NET. Yeah, a lot of times you're using the same keywords you

I think a lot of this will improve with Rails 3's new query syntax. It looks a lot like LINQ for .NET. Yeah, a lot of times you're using the same keywords you might use in SQL, but the new chainable extensions are really nice for building up queries and reusing common chunks (either in LINQ or in Rails 3) I should note that this new relational syntax is provided by a library called Arel (http://github.com/nkallen/arel http://github.com/nkallen/arel)