Ruby rails - select only few columns from the data base

Question

What is the way in rails to structure sql query to only select certain columns from the database, I have some large data fields which I want to avoid loading from continuous

Answer 1

Using Arel (aka in Rails 3), use:

Item.where(...).select("name, address")

Also, it seems .select gets ignored if you tack on a scope that has an :include => ...