<p>How can I tell Activerecord to not load blob columns unless explicitly asked for? There are some pretty large blobs in my legacy DB that must be excluded for 'normal' Objects.</p>

I believe you can ask AR to load specific columns in your invocation to find:
```
```
MyModel.find(id, :select => 'every, attribute, except, the, blobs')
```
```
However, this would need to be updated as you add columns, so it's not ideal.  I don't think there is any way to specifically exclude one column in rails (nor in a single SQL select).
I guess you could write it like this:
```
```
MyModel.find(id, :select => (MyModel.column_names - ['column_to_exclude']).join(', '))
```
```
Test these out before you take my word for it though. :)