Main concepts¶
Find Tinybird Analytics-related terms and their definitions.
Data Sources¶
When you import data into Tinybird Analytics it goes into a Data Source. It is where you store your data; you can append more data to each of them as well as perform SQL queries against them.
Data Sources can be managed through the Console UI or the Data Sources API.
Pipes¶
Pipes are the most important concept in Tinybird Analytics. They are a sequence of one or more SQL queries (transformations) that you can:
apply to one or more Data Sources,
apply to the result of other pipes, and
publish as an API endpoint that anyone with permissions can then query through HTTP in JSON or CSV formats.

Auth tokens table scopes can be applied to full tables, or filtered rows.¶
Think of Pipes as data transformations. You can transform your data through Pipes and the result is a resource you can query: if you have a pipe called test_pipe
, you can query it like SELECT count() from test_pipe
. If test_pipe
has three transformations (three different SQL queries), Tinybird will apply all those queries in sequence when you use it.
Auth Tokens¶
Access to Tinybird Analytics’s API requires an Auth Token that connects API requests to your account with special permissions. Once you get access to the platform, a default admin Auth Token gets created for you, but you can also create and manage additional tokens through Tinybird’s 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 (
DATASOURCES
,PIPES
),different permissions (
CREATE
,DROP
,APPEND
orREAD
), andfilters (e.g.
"City='Madrid'"
) through which you can restrict access to specific subsets of your Data Sources or pipes.
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 Tinybird Analytics. 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 its official website.