Most people just use Yaml for configuration. The prime example is the database.yml file found in almost every single Rails app. But here's a way to take advantage of Yaml in Ruby as a way to serialize and transfer lots of separate records from one place to another. The standard yaml library found in Ruby is all you need. First, to serialize the target set of records. For our example, we're just going to stream to a file, but one can use any IO stream. And instead of streaming an indeterminate number of records, we're going to bound this process with a fixed number of records.

require 'yaml'
file = File.open('test.yml', 'w')
for x in 0..100
  hash = {
    'id' => x,
    'field1' => "somedata",
    'field2' => "someother data",
    'option' => true
  }
  file.write hash.to_yaml
end
file.close

Notice that all we needed to do is call the #to_yaml method to do the serialization. It also handles adds the Yaml document start character sequence automatically (i.e. "---", three dashes alone on a new line). To read that stream of data:

File.open('test.yml', 'r') do |io|
  YAML.each_document(io) do |record|
    # Do something here
    puts record.inspect
  end
end

Question: What's the advantage here? Answer: Constant memory footprint. We only read in as much as we need to handle the next Yaml document (object, hash). So if you're processing a 2 Gig file, the process won't try to load the entire file into memory at once. Or you may not actually know how many records will come over the wire. Some Uses:

• Mass dumping data from one system to another where the source system lacks write permissions, or even network access, to the target system.
• Data Archival in a common format. Yaml is accessible by tools without the need for a SQL database... if one archived everything in SQL dumps. And this lets you keep rows clustered in manageable sized files.
• Stream real-time updates from one system to another. Either HTTP post a batch document stream to a Webhook, or just read and write on raw TCP sockets.