Greetings! This tutorial will help clarify some core Druid concepts. We will use a realtime dataset and issue some basic Druid queries. If you are ready to explore Druid, and learn a thing or two, read on!
The data source we'll be working with is the Bit.ly USA Government website statistics stream. You can see the stream [here](http://developer.usa.gov/1usagov), and read about the stream [here](http://www.usa.gov/About/developer-resources/1usagov.shtml) . This is a feed of json data that gets updated whenever anyone clicks a bit.ly shortened USA.gov website. A typical event might look something like this:
We've built a tarball that contains everything you'll need. You'll find it [here](http://static.druid.io/artifacts/releases/druid-services-0.5.50-bin.tar.gz)
Once the node starts up you will see a bunch of logs about setting up properties and connecting to the data source. If everything was successful, you should see messages of the form shown below.
The Druid real time-node ingests events in an in-memory buffer. Periodically, these events will be persisted to disk. If you are interested in the details of our real-time architecture and why we persist indexes to disk, I suggest you read our [White Paper](http://static.druid.io/docs/druid.pdf).
This is a `groupBy` query, which you may be familiar with from SQL. We are grouping, or aggregating, via the `dimensions` field: . We are **filtering** via the `"country"` dimension, to only look at website hits in the US. Our **aggregations** are what we are calculating: a row count, and the sum of the number of known users in our data.
This groupBy query is a bit complicated and we'll return to it later. For the time being, just make sure you are getting some blocks of data back. If you are having problems, make sure you have [curl](http://curl.haxx.se/) installed. Control+C to break out of the client script.
Druid queries are JSON blobs which are relatively painless to create programmatically, but an absolute pain to write by hand. So anyway, we are going to create a Druid query by hand. Add the following to the file you just created:
As you can probably tell, the result is indicating the maximum and minimum timestamps we've seen thus far (summarized to a minutely granularity). Let's explore a bit further.
Return to your favorite editor and create the file:
You are probably wondering, what are these [Granularities](Granularities.html) and [Aggregations](Aggregations.html) things? What the query is doing is aggregating some metrics over some span of time.
If you issue the query again, you should notice your results updating.
Right now all the results you are getting back are being aggregated into a single timestamp bucket. What if we wanted to see our aggregations on a per minute basis? What field can we change in the query to accomplish this?
If you loudly exclaimed "we can change granularity to minute", you are absolutely correct! We can specify different granularities to bucket our results, like so:
One of Druid's main powers is to provide answers to problems, so let's pose a problem. What if we wanted to know what the top states in the US are, ordered by the number of visits by known users over the last few minutes? To solve this problem, we have to return to the query we introduced at the very beginning of this tutorial, the [GroupByQuery](GroupByQuery.html). It would be nice if we could group by results by dimension value and somehow sort those results… and it turns out we can!
Woah! Our query just got a way more complicated. Now we have these [Filters](Filters.html) things and this [OrderBy](OrderBy.html) thing. Fear not, it turns out the new objects we've introduced to our query can help define the format of our results and provide an answer to our question.
This tutorial is merely showcasing a small fraction of what Druid can do. If you are interested in more information about Druid, including setting up a more sophisticated Druid cluster, please read the other links in our wiki.
And thus concludes our journey! Hopefully you learned a thing or two about Druid real-time ingestion, querying Druid, and how Druid can be used to solve problems. If you have additional questions, feel free to post in our [google groups page](http://www.groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/druid-development).