has_many through => find not matching records - ruby-on-rails

Question

I want to be able to find unpopulated hives, but don't find any solution.
Can you help me please ?
The goal is to be able to do Hive.unpopulated
The main problem is the most_recent, butins ok for me to work with a raw SQL, but I don't find the right query.
Here are my classes :
class Hive < ApplicationRecord
has_many :moves, dependent: :destroy
has_many :yards, through: :moves
has_many :populations, -> { where(:most_recent => true) }
has_many :colonies, through: :populations
validates :name, uniqueness: true
def hive_with_colony
"#{name} (colony #{if self.colonies.count > 0 then self.colonies.last.id end})"
end
def self.populated
Hive.joins(:populations)
end
def self.unpopulated
end
end
class Population < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :hive
belongs_to :colony
after_create :mark_most_recent
before_create :mark_end
class Colony < ApplicationRecord
has_many :populations, -> { where(:most_recent => true) }
has_many :hives, through: :populations
has_many :visits
has_many :varroas
has_many :most_recents_populations, -> { where(:most_recent => true) }, :class_name => 'Population'
scope :last_population_completed, -> { joins(:populations).where('populations.most_recent=?', true)}

Answer 1

I think you can do a simple query to select Hives which are not in populated list, so:
def self.unpopulated
where.not(id: populated.select(:id))
end

Answer 2

Another option is a LEFT OUTER JOIN and picking the lines that have no population id set on the right side.
def self.unpopulated
left_outer_joins(:populations).where(populations: { id: nil })
end
It depends on your data if Thanh's version (which compares a potentially huge list of ids) or this version (which makes a sightly more complex join but doesn't need to compare against a list of ids) is more performant.