Changelog: New API endpoints pages for easier integration, upgraded version of ClickHouse and more

Building real-time data apps & products gets faster everyday with Tinybird: a new way to publish and consume API endpoints, Tinybird running on the latest version of ClickHouse and a wealth of other small but critical enhancements.

That, plus a lot of progress on a yet unreleased project, is what we’ve been up to lately.

What’s new?

Analytics API endpoints

Publishing API endpoints in Tinybird couldn’t be easier: bring your data, write your SQL and click on “Publish”.

But what happens after you click “Publish”?

Well, you now get our new and automatically generated endpoint page. Ready to share for developers to integrate. With documentation, params and OpenAPI 3.0 compliant specs.

And the internal version has usage logs and stats: that way you have all the control over how your API endpoints are performing and being used.

Check out the video below on how to build an API Endpoint out of a large CSV file:

Want to know more? Here’s the release blog post and an integration example of the endpoints page for a COVID-19 API.

The latest stable version of ClickHouse

Tinybird uses ClickHouse under the covers. You can take advantage of all its mighty analytical capabilities, but we don’t want you to worry about the complexities of managing, maintaining and scaling up an analytical database.

In that spirit, we recently upgraded to the latest stable version of Clickhouse (20.7.2.30).

But what does upgrading ClickHouse mean to you? There are a bunch of improvements in the last version, to name a few:

• Performance improvements AKA. even faster queries! (up to 2x in some cases), thanks to a new architecture in the query execution system.
• A bunch of new and optimized geospatial and JSON operators.
• Lots of enhancements and bug fixes (including some of them coming from us 😊): Support for ILIKE, EXPLAIN queries, better integration with S3 and more.

A beta release of our most powerful tool yet

As developers and data engineers, we often work collaboratively on data projects. And when we do, we like to use certain things that make us more productive: our text editors of choice, the command line, collaborating over a source code repository and so on.

You and your team will soon be able to do all of that with Tinybird. All of it thanks to our new Command Line Interface we lovingly call tb.

It is still in beta, but we and some of our customers are already using it full time. Take a sneak peek at tb’s CLI documentation if you want to get a sense of how it works.

Enhancements

A Better import experience

We have improved the reliability of our ingestion API. While we summarized most of the enhancements in this blog post, we keep enhancing our Import API, so for instance, we now support CSV files with new lines and our header and type guesser are way more reliable.

Still having problems importing a datasource for the first time? You can now disable type guessing and do the transformations on the fly with pipes and materialized views.

A more user-friendly and efficient dashboard

A few months ago we released a new dashboard to operate with your data and APIs in Tinybird.

And we continue making it faster and simpler. We’ve added literally a B-U-N-C-H of improvements, but find below just some of them:

• A cleaner dashboard: clear out all recent items

• More visibility? Collapse the sidebar from a button in the bottom left corner
• Higher productivity with better autocomplete hints

• All your nodes up to date with node previews directly from the pipe definition
• Faster integration with new code snippets and results preview

• A cleaner workspace with the ability to truncate quarantine tables
• Always up to date datasource and pipes: now the dashboard makes less parallel requests avoiding blocking the browser network threads

Bug fixes

There have been several bug fixes as well. Here are three of them:

• Several fixes in the schema parsing of datasources, to support DEFAULT, CASTS and other symbols.
• Replace with condition and populate now work with data sources that use the Join engine.
• And we fixed the spotlight! Have you tried typing s in the UI?

Want to be up-to-date with new bug fixes? Keep an eye on our changelog, which we update on every deploy to production.

Most of these new features, enhancements and bug fixes are based on the continuous feedback we receive from you, our users, so please keep it coming!

What are your main challenges when dealing with large quantities of data? Request access to Tinybird and get started with real-time analytics right away.

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