Active record class VS simple query

[eluser]BrianDHall[/eluser]
$this->db->get('my_table') is faster, because it is less typing and its hard to screw up the syntax.

There is of course a big difference in execution time/resources and development speed

Always the word of caution, but it is likely the difference in speed is on the order of fractions of a millisecond - avoid using query strings directly just because they are 'faster', for the same reason you use CI even though just using a pure php spaghetti-coded page would be 'faster'.

Put if you have profiled your application and determined that AR functions are a significant constraining factor to application performance and a pseudo-test has been done to confirm you aren't wasting your time, then you should in fact drop built-in database objects entirely where possible and rely on direct system-specific optimized query calls - it might buy you more than a handful of clockcycles that ->query() vs ->get() could ever buy you. Still seems like a bit of a local optimization, but YMMV.