On the Debuggable blog, Tim Koschutzki shows how to use grouping in your SQL statements with the find() method calls inside of a Model for an app.

We have to thank Mark Story and wluigi for working on group by conditions for Cake's Model::find() method. Up until now, you would have to add your GROUP BY stuff to string'ed conditions in order to support a group by statement, which could be very ugly.

He has some code included that compares the two methods - the newer of the two applying the 'group' option as a regular condition to the query object.

This functionality is currently only in the the Release Candidate 1 but will be included in the next major release.