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Alex Spinov
Alex Spinov

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Tinybird Has a Free API — Real-Time Analytics on Billions of Rows

#tinybird #analytics #database #api

TL;DR

Tinybird is a real-time analytics platform built on ClickHouse. Ingest billions of events, query in milliseconds, and publish API endpoints — all from SQL. Free tier: 10 GB storage, unlimited queries.

What Is Tinybird?

Tinybird turns data into APIs:

  • Real-time ingestion — millions of events per second
  • Millisecond queries — ClickHouse engine under the hood
  • SQL to API — write SQL, get a REST endpoint
  • Materialized views — pre-compute aggregations
  • Git-based workflows — version control your data pipes
  • Free tier — 10 GB, unlimited reads

Quick Start 

# Install CLI
pip install tinybird-cli

# Authenticate
tb auth --token YOUR_TOKEN

# Push data
tb datasource push events.csv --name events
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Ingest Data 

# HTTP Events API (real-time ingestion)
curl -X POST 'https://api.tinybird.co/v0/events?name=page_views' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN' \
  -d '{"timestamp":"2024-01-15T10:30:00","page":"/home","user_id":"u123","country":"US"}'
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// Node.js SDK
import { Tinybird } from "@chronark/zod-bird";

const tb = new Tinybird({ token: "YOUR_TOKEN" });

// Ingest events
await tb.publish({
  datasource: "page_views",
  data: [
    { timestamp: new Date(), page: "/home", user_id: "u123" },
    { timestamp: new Date(), page: "/about", user_id: "u456" },
  ],
});
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Create API Endpoints (Pipes) 

-- pipes/top_pages.pipe
-- This SQL becomes a REST API endpoint!

NODE top_pages
SQL >
  SELECT
    page,
    count() as views,
    uniq(user_id) as unique_users
  FROM page_views
  WHERE timestamp >= now() - interval {{period:String}} 
  GROUP BY page
  ORDER BY views DESC
  LIMIT {{limit:Int32}}
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# Query the API
curl 'https://api.tinybird.co/v0/pipes/top_pages.json?period=7 day&limit=10' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_READ_TOKEN'

# Response:
# {"data": [{"page": "/home", "views": 15234, "unique_users": 8721}, ...]}
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Real-Time Dashboard 

// Frontend: query Tinybird API directly
async function fetchMetrics(period: string) {
  const response = await fetch(
    `https://api.tinybird.co/v0/pipes/dashboard_metrics.json?period=${period}`,
    { headers: { Authorization: `Bearer ${READ_TOKEN}` } }
  );
  return response.json();
}

// Real-time: poll every 5 seconds
setInterval(async () => {
  const { data } = await fetchMetrics("1 hour");
  updateDashboard(data);
}, 5000);
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Materialized Views 

-- Pre-compute hourly aggregations
NODE hourly_stats
SQL >
  SELECT
    toStartOfHour(timestamp) as hour,
    page,
    count() as views,
    uniq(user_id) as users,
    avg(load_time) as avg_load_time
  FROM page_views
  GROUP BY hour, page

TYPE materialized
DATASOURCE hourly_stats_mv
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Tinybird vs Alternatives

Feature Tinybird BigQuery Elasticsearch Mixpanel
Query latency <100ms Seconds 100-500ms Seconds
Free tier 10 GB 1 TB/mo queries Self-host 20M events
SQL to API Built-in Manual No No
Real-time ingest Yes Streaming insert Yes Yes
Engine ClickHouse Dremel Lucene Custom
Setup Instant Console Complex Instant

Resources

Analyzing scraped web data in real-time? My Apify tools extract data from any website — pipe it into Tinybird for instant analytics. Questions? Email spinov001@gmail.com

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