the connection adapters have a #select_values method
http://rails.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/ConnectionAdapters/DatabaseStatements.html#M000727
Of course you know. Arrays are objects too. Like everything else in Ruby. btw I can't remember where I found it, I thin, on a Joyent podcast, a few weeks back, but object creation in Ruby supposedly takes only 145 nano-seconds. I don't know if that applies only to the bare Object.new constructor but I don't see why dealing with your message objects gives you "a hard time". Anywho, just my little vent.
In my own personal, very limited benchmarking, I have had some very nasty surprises when I’ve included an array creation inside a loop. The results over a few thousand iterations can be significant in my experiments.
Daniel