title: Firebase - Request only new data using the Streaming API in Ruby or Python
body: <p>I've posted this in Firebase's google group but haven't received an answer so I thought I would try here.</p>
  
  <p>Let me outline my current scenario</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>I have a global messages bucket that stores messages by room.  So path messages/room_1/  would store a prioritized list of messages for room 1.</li>
  <li>I want to stream the latest messages for all rooms so that I can send push notifications to offline users.  So essentially I want to listen to the /messages path from a ruby or python backed server and send notifications to offline users.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>My problem is that when I initially start listening to the /messages path I get the entire set of data, which can be millions of messages.  After the initial bulk load, I get new incoming messages in real time.  Is there any way to skip that initial bulk load of data and just get new messages from the start of the streaming connection? </p>
  
  <p>Fyi, I'm using examples from this page: <a href="https://www.firebase.com/blog/2014-03-24-streaming-for-firebase-rest-api.html">https://www.firebase.com/blog/2014-03-24-streaming-for-firebase-rest-api.html</a></p>