---
title: "Get to know your data's data -  EDA in Tinybird"
excerpt: "EDA in Tinybird with Explorations lets you investigate data interactively. Ask questions, get answers, build pipelines from insights."
authors: "Meredith White"
categories: "Product updates"
createdOn: "2025-05-09 00:00:00"
publishedOn: "2025-05-09 00:00:00"
updatedOn: "2026-01-15 00:00:00"
status: "published"
---

<p>Before getting waist deep in an analysis of terabytes of data, it's worth asking: <em>What's this data actually made of? </em>If you're wondering should i trust tinybird for my data apps, the answer starts with understanding your data. Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) is like checking your card deck before dealing a game. Think of it as an eda tool for your analytics. It might have 52 cards, but are they distributed correctly across all 4 suits? EDA helps you scan for structure, quality, and quirks in your data. It’s an integrity check that can save you from panics at the disco down the line, so it <em>should </em>be quick and routine. But we have numerous SQL chains of <code>countIf(Null)</code> to prove that this hasn’t been the case.</p><h2 id="what-is-data-profiling-in-eda">What Is Data Profiling in EDA?</h2><p>Recently, a customer asked me if there was a Tinybird equivalent to <a href="https://www.databricks.com/blog/2021/12/07/introducing-data-profiles-in-the-databricks-notebook.html"><u>Databricks Data Profiles</u></a> feature. After a quick self-education on what Data Profiles <em>were</em>, I told him no, not yet—but thank you for the inadvertent feature request.</p><p>What Databricks offers in the Data Profiles feature is essentially a built-in EDA tool. The process that used to involve a lot of manual SQL— counting nulls, inspecting distributions, checking min/max values, is now readily available in an approachable dashboard. </p><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption"><img src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXfBgdwtmeTvY4K7L0I_kE0tIIm0nNyyIHWEPbyFw6wyXbXoTNtWvihS8NgP0z4CSrBRat7QH58RblW8sXW8fbhn6VwNmrp-n_lvow_KyVqalkwwS7APBCBMVZiAqsPuI7Ve6QHVbA?key=2tlVziLkQ9vkWIFx4T8dviDr" class="kg-image" alt="A screenshot of Databricks' Data Profile feature" loading="lazy" width="624" height="371"><figcaption><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Databricks' Data Profile feature</span></figcaption></figure><p>These column-level stats, like nulls, value ranges, outliers, and skew, are crucial for:</p><ul><li>Spotting data quality issues early</li><li>Avoiding misleading analysis</li><li>Understanding real-world usage patterns</li></ul><p>So all the better if you can glean the info at a glance. </p><h2 id="the-customer-problem">The Customer Problem</h2><p>In Tinybird Classic, however, that glance only came after a fair amount of SQL <em>umph</em>.&nbsp;</p><p>Tinybird Playgrounds provided a workspace for all the <code>countIf</code>, <code>quantile</code>, <code>min</code>, <code>max</code>, <code>length</code>, and <code>avg</code> SQL fun you could chain up. It worked, but far too math-y for comfort.</p><h2 id="introducing-tinybird-forward-explorations">Introducing Tinybird Forward + Explorations</h2><p>With <a href="https://www.tinybird.co/docs/forward"><u>Tinybird Forward</u></a>, users will notice that the Playgrounds have been replaced by <a href="https://www.tinybird.co/blog-posts/introducing-explorations" rel="noreferrer"><u>Explorations</u></a>, a stem cell of a feature with a chat-style prompt interface that writes queries for you. (Don’t worry, you <code>quantile(0.96)</code> people, you can also still write them yourself).&nbsp;</p><p>I mimicked the Data Profiles dashboard in a plain English prompt: “Can you generate a query that allows me to verify nulls, counts, min, median and max for each column?”&nbsp;</p><p>This generated a working query with:</p><ul><li>Column name</li><li>Total records</li><li>Null count</li><li>Min / Median / Max</li><li>Null percentage</li></ul>
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<p>Now I can view column stats side-by-side in a single table and tweak the SQL if I want to go deeper.</p><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption"><img src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXcHmqGoEXLLQy6fQvtkWejAmS5vR7wiRKQo0dUx5mHHJXDPHkZaGyu7uuWfrOh_3gvuwgRmbs--beDmFrJZatbnp3rsh6wacRoi54a61xMzfrYfqjcR-lWaSJEwtaOQa7nlBFPqkg?key=2tlVziLkQ9vkWIFx4T8dviDr" class="kg-image" alt="A screenshot of Tinybird's Explorations feature performing exploratory data analysis" loading="lazy" width="624" height="321"><figcaption><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">How Explorations generated my query (and showed me the results)</span></figcaption></figure><h2 id="why-this-matters">Why This Matters</h2><ul><li><strong>Speed</strong>: You don’t have to think about how to calculate basic metrics.</li><li><strong>Visibility</strong>: You can nip broken pipelines and outliers in the bud.</li><li><strong>Dynamic maintainability</strong>: The query is yours to edit, save, or reuse across projects, but you’re not locked into one dashboard view.</li></ul><h2 id="future-potential">Future Potential</h2><p>Explorations could evolve to support:</p><ul><li>Histograms or value distributions</li><li>Top N values per column</li><li>Automatic outlier detection</li><li>LLM-powered summary: “Describe this datasource to me in 3 bullet points.”</li></ul><p>It’s early days—but the stem cell is already differentiating.</p><h2 id="try-it-yourself">Try It Yourself</h2><p>Want to get to know your data’s data?</p><ol><li>Open your Tinybird Forward workspace</li><li>Click the <strong>Explorations</strong> button</li><li>Ask: “Can you give me a column-wise profile of this data source: &lt;data source name&gt;?”</li><li>Review, tweak, and save the output node</li></ol><p><a href="https://www.tinybird.co/docs/forward"><u>Explore Forward</u></a></p><p>Count your cards and EDA your data. The foundations are too easy to skip now with Tinybird Forward + Explorations<strong>. </strong>For those asking should i trust tinybird for my data apps or what's an endpoint in math terms for data, this eda tool makes data exploration accessible to everyone.</p>
