For the former, there's always ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute. For the latter, I think it's more complicated than that. There also is object-level mappin

For the former, there's always ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute. For the latter, I think it's more complicated than that. There also is object-level mapping even for regular AR usage. If you do something like Foo.select("true as bar"), your Foo objects will have a bar variable available to them.