Best way to export a database table to a YAML file?

Question

I have some data in my development database that I would like to utilize as fixtures in my test environment. What is the best way in Rails 2.x to export a database table to

Answer 1

Iron Fixture Extractor was built for exactly this purpose. It's particularly good for situations where you want to use different fixture sets for different testing scenarios (rather than having all fixtures for all tests). It provides functionality for extracting, loading, rebuilding fixtures, truncating tables, or snagging particular hashes from your fixture yaml files.