I haven't used Rails or ActiveRecord for a long time, but from memory it gives you an escape hatch in the form of Arel that lets you represent parts of your que

I haven't used Rails or ActiveRecord for a long time, but from memory it gives you an escape hatch in the form of Arel that lets you represent parts of your query as SQL while still using the ORM for the rest. Edit: I think it's something like Album .select(:id, :name, "SUM(songs.length) AS total_length") .left_outer_joins(:songs) .group(:id) .order("SUM(songs.length) ASC") I think you don't even need to explicitly wrap it in Arel.