Today, I wanted to experiment with the Tinybird MCP. Since I didn’t have any workspaces with suitable data, I decided to create a new one using the iconic Titanic dataset from the Kaggle competition. My goal was to query this dataset using the MCP.

The creation of the new workspace was pretty straighful.

$ mkdir titanic && cd titanic
# Download the train.csv and rename as titanic.csv
$ tb create
$ tb create --data titanic.csv
$ tb login
$ tb --cloud deploy

Well!!! I have a mispelling on titanic and create my datasource as titanict, in order to fix it I have to allow a destructive deploy

$ tb --cloud deploy --allow-destructive-operations
$ tb --cloud datasource append titanic --file fixtures/titanic.csv

With that corrected, my workspace was ready, and I could set up the MCP and start querying.

Titanic dataset workspace

I hadn’t used Claude before, so this was a new experience. After configuring it:

$ code ~/.config/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

I started playing around.

Claude prompt

Unfortunately, I ran into problems. Of all the times to write a blog post, I chose one where the Claude MCP tools were failing!

Claude MCP tool failing

./Interlude: Troubleshooting

After a few more unsuccessful attempts, I started looking for alternatives. I noticed mcp-tinybird was still running on my machine.

Btop mcp-tinybird

I decided to ask Copilot (in Agent mode with Claude Sonnet 4) to check for locally running MCP servers.

Vscode detect running MCP servers

It detected the Tinybird MCP server, but couldn’t communicate with it. So, I fetched the Tinybird MCP documentation.

Vscode fetching Tinybird MCP documentation

This time, Copilot successfully generated a Python script to list the MCP capabilities.

Vscode list Tinybird MCP capabilities

However, when I asked for the rows of my titanic datasource, it failed to communicate with the MCP server and resorted to using the Tinybird API instead.

Vscode Tinybird API

./Conclusion

Not a complete win this time. However, while I was trying these workarounds, the Claude MCP tool issue seemed to resolve itself. I was then able to chat with my titanic datasource and get some interesting results!

Claude survival analysis

Claude first class passengers

It seems the MCP journey can be a bit bumpy, but the destination is worth it!