Rails 3.1 and above has an awesome feature of prepared_statements. The basic idea behind prepared statements is to compile SQL statements once and cached for it future use. In other words - The benefit to prepared statements is that the database does not have to compile a query plan for every piece of SQL sent to it, potentially saving a lot of time. Checkout an excellent blog(blog) to know more on prepared_statements. Recently, I had to get raw sql from AR object so that I can pass it to EXPLAIN statement to get total number of