Main concepts

Find Tinybird-related terms and their definitions.

Datasources

In Tinybird, a datasource is where you store your data. Datasources support performing SQL queries, as well as appending new data to them.

Datasources can be managed through the Console UI or the Datasource API.

Pipes

Pipes are the most important concept in Tinybird. They allow to transform and publish the data from a datasource.

 _____________    _____________     _____________
|            |    |            |    |            |
| datasource | => |    Pipe    | => |    API     |
|____________|    |____________|    |____________|

Pipes are data transformations. They transform data from a datasource (see bellow) or another pipe but the result is the same: a resource you can query. So if you have a pipe called test_pipe, you can query it like SELECT count() from test_pipe. Tinybird applies all the transformations defined in the pipe when you use it.

Auth Tokens

Access to Tinybird web services requires an Auth Token that connects API requests to your account with special permissions. Once you get access to the platform, your default admin Auth Token will be available on your Account Tokens page. You can also manage and create additional tokens on your Console UI or using the Auth token API.

Auth tokens table scopes can be applied to full tables, or filtered rows.

When creating a new Auth token, you have the option of setting one or many scopes. Each scope adds a different permissions to the Auth token, allowing it to be used to access restricted APIs, tables or a subset of your data.

CORS

Our web services support Cross-Origin Requests with no domain restrictions. To support Internet Explorer 8 and 9, use a library that falls back to XDomainRequest, like corslite.

ClickHouse

ClickHouse is an important part of the Tinybird engine. It is is an Open Source column-oriented database management system (DBMS) for online analytical processing of queries (OLAP). You can learn more about ClickHouse in it’s official website.