I have the following line in my ActiveRecord model:
class Record < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :users, :through => :record_users, :uniq => true,
I ran into something similar before and I believe it's an AR bug related to PGSQL (https://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994/tickets/1711-has-many-through-association-with-order-causes-a-sql-error-with-postgresql).
I got around it by dropping the DISTINCT (:uniq) directive and resolved the uniq records another way. Kind of a bummer though.
I suppose you could call it a bug in ActiveRecord. PosgreSQL is a bit more restrictive than MySQL. You can help out ActiveRecord by setting up the association like this instead:
class Record < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :users,
:through => :record_users,
:select => 'DISTINCT users.*, record_users.index',
:order => "record_users.index ASC"
Just posted this issue on rails's issue tracker on github (copied from lighthouse ticket so we could bring it back.. it was marked invalid):
https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/520
Promote it if you want this fixed nicely! :)