From ActiveRecord to Raw SQL

ActiveRecord is awesome. Its dynamic finder methods, scopes, and effortless joins make working with a database a snap. But there are always those times when writing raw sql makes more sense. In my case, I was joining across several tables, and then sorting by a value from the joined table. The problem was that my views were written to handle an ActiveRecord object, not a simple hash, which is what a find_by_sql query returns. Before: 
#controller:
@posts = Post.find(:all)

#view:
< % @posts.each do |post| %>
   < %= post.title %>
   < %= post.body %>
   < %= post.author %>
   < %= post.date %>
< % end %>
After: 
#controller:
@posts = ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute("SELECT * FROM posts")
# @posts.class #=> Hash
# @posts[0].title will return a method missing error
For the view you have two choices. 1)Rewrite the method calls: 
< % @posts.each do |post| %>
    < %= post['title'] %>
    < %= post['body'] %>
   < %= post['author'] %>
    < %= post['date'] %>
< % end %>
#this is tedious
or 2) Hack the hash to make keys act as methods. There are several ways to do this. From a stackoverflow question I asked, someone showed me a module in the Ruby standard library called OpenStruct: 
#controller
require 'ostruct'
@posts = OpenStruct.new(ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute("SELECT * FROM posts"))

#view
< % @posts.each do |post| %>
   < %= post.title %>
   < %= post.body %>
   < %= post.author %>
   < %= post.date %>
< % end %>
Other ways to do this (from stackoverflow answerers): You can try these out with a really cool pastebin that actually runs the code: It's interesting that all of these solutions used about 5mb of memory according to the ideone.com.
Alan 19 November 2009