[eluser]n0xie[/eluser]
Euhm, what's the point in using Active Record if you're going to write your own queries...?
The whole point of Active Record is to abstract away the SQL statements and treat a database as 'just another data object'. In an ideal world it shouldn't matter what implementation is used to store the data, be it database, sqlfile, csv, xml or whatever other format you can think up. The Active Record class should determine what is needed to supply the needed data. Hence it doesn't matter (much) what type of database you use (postgresql, mysql, mssql, oracle etc) since the Active Record class will construct the SQL statements according to the database driver it uses.
If you're going to write your own SQL statements, you might as well NOT use Active Record since it comes at a slight performance cost.