If you’re a Rockset customer, you’ll probably be aware by now that Rockset has been acquired by OpenAI. We’re excited for our friends at Rockset, but we also recognise that this means many of their customers will need to find a new home. Following the acquisition, Rockset have announced that the service will be shutdown on Monday, September 30th, 2024, 5 PM PDT.
This post will show you how Tinybird offers a natural migration path for user-facing analytics, applications and dashboards. It will cover what Tinybird is, how Rockset features map to Tinybird and what Tinybird uniquely offers.
What is Tinybird?
Tinybird is a great alternative to Rockset's analytical capabilities.
Tinybird is a data platform for data and engineering teams to solve complex real-time, operational, and user-facing analytics use cases at any scale, with end-to-end latency in milliseconds for streaming ingest and high QPS workloads.
It's a SQL-first analytics engine, purpose-built for the cloud, with real-time data ingest and full JOIN support. Native, managed ingest connectors make it easy to ingest data from a variety of sources. SQL queries can be published as production-grade, scalable REST APIs for public use or secured with JWTs.
Tinybird is a managed platform that scales transparently, requiring no cluster operations, shard management or worrying about replicas.
See how Tinybird is used by industry-leading companies today in the Customer Stories hub.
How Rockset features map to Tinybird
Rockset offered many features that made it a great choice for building user-facing analytics applications. Fortunately, Tinybird shares many of these features and offers much more on top.
Data Sources and managed ingest connectors
Rockset offered a host of managed ingest connectors that made it easy to connect to existing data stores & sources.
Tinybird has a similar library of completely managed connectors that are available via UI, API, CLI and can be defined in files stored in git. All Tinybird connectors are entirely hosted by Tinybird, with nothing to deploy on your own infrastructure.
If you need a Connector that we don’t already list, please let us know at support@tinybird.co
Rollups and Materialized Views
Rockset’s Rollups allowed aggregation of data in real-time as it is ingested. In Tinybird, this is achieved with Materialized Views (MVs).
Materialized Views in Tinybird are event-driven and incremental. When data lands in a source table (regardless of any ingest mechanism), any downstream MV is triggered to update. When this occurs, previous data is not reprocessed, instead, existing aggregations are updated with new data only. You can read more about the detail of how Materialized Views work here in our docs.
Aggregations and joins
Rockset provided the capability to perform aggregations and joins at high scale using only SQL. Tinybird is also SQL-first, where SQL is the primary (and only) mechanism for querying data.
Tinybird is 99% ANSI SQL compatible, but adds many additional SQL features & syntactical sugar to make building complex logic much easier.
Tinybird likely supports any aggregation you can think of, and has full support for JOINs. We are key contributors to ClickHouse, and have been one of the primary drivers behind making ClickHouse JOIN support better than ever.
Query lambdas and API Endpoints
Query lambdas in Rockset allow you to invoke a saved SQL query by calling a REST API endpoint.
In Tinybird, REST APIs have been the primary method of accessing query results since day 1. They are integral to our platform, and we are supporting over 45 billion API requests a year from our customers.
To create a REST API in Tinybird, you write a SQL query and can publish it with a single click via the UI, API, CLI, or by defining it in a file. You can give user-friendly names to APIs, accept dynamic query parameters, and get auto-generated OpenAPI3.0 docs.
Tinybird also supports customer-generated JWTs to secure APIs and auth thousands of users in multi-tenant applications.
Zero maintenance overhead
Just like Rockset, Tinybird is a fully managed, severless, SaaS data platform. Engineers already have enough going on trying to build valuable services without spending time maintaining the systems beneath them. Tinybird abstracts all complex infrastructure management tasks, such that the user never has to think about machine resources, cluster operations or sharding/partitioning. The Tinybird platform team are experts in managing infrastructure, and have built the best-in-class tooling and processes that allow Tinybird to be relied upon for business-critical services by the world's top brands.
Additional features Tinybird offers
Reduced vendor lock-in
Tinybird is based on ClickHouse, an open-source OLAP database, with significant enhancements. Because of this, data can be exported from Tinybird and imported into any other ClickHouse installation, be it self-managed or another cloud provider. Similarly, most queries can be imported to other ClickHouse instances and executed without modification, or you can simply export your data in a standard interchange format like csv or parquet to load into other systems as required
Under the circumstances, this should offer some peace of mind.
JWT support
If you’re building a user-facing application and need to give users access to data, you need to consider how that access is secured. While Tinybird can be used to create highly scalable public APIs, multi-tenant applications often need to provide secure access to tenant-specific data. The most common way that apps auth users is via JWTs, and Tinybird has full out-of-the-box support for customer-signed JWTs. Using a shared secret, your app can sign a custom JWT and pass it to Tinybird as a bearer token when calling a Tinybird REST API (equivalent to Rockset’s Query lambdas). Tinybird will decode the JWT with the shared secret to know that it is valid. Within this JWT, your app can embed parameters, such as a tenant ID, which are passed to Tinybird and exposed to your SQL queries, giving you row-level access control over your data.
Tinybird Charts
Publishing REST APIs is the primary way to share data from Tinybird, and gives you the ultimate flexibility to integrate that data with any system or library you want. But, sometimes, you want a visualization even faster. Tinybird Charts allows you to create charts inside the UI in a few clicks, and embed them in your apps as React components or as iframes. This makes it possible to add charts to internal or external applications in a matter of minutes.
Enhanced developer experience
Tinybird is famed for putting developer experience first. Our customers have discovered that solo engineers can get features into production in days, that would previously have taken their team several weeks. By abstracting all maintenance overhead, engineers can focus on building valuable use cases. The Tinybird UI provides a full IDE-like experience that makes it fast to develop new use cases, while the VS Code plugin and the ability to define Tinybird resources as text-files bring development down to your existing dev & release flows.
Getting started with Tinybird
Get started with Tinybird by creating a free account today.
Many existing Rockset customers are using Amazon DynamoDB or MongoDB. Be sure to read our guide for ingesting data from Amazon DynamoDB, and our recent blog post on using MongoDB.
Need additional migration support? Contact us via support@tinybird.co or join our Slack Community.
