---
id: timeboundaryquery
title: "TimeBoundary queries"
sidebar_label: "TimeBoundary"
---

<!--
  ~ Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one
  ~ or more contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file
  ~ distributed with this work for additional information
  ~ regarding copyright ownership.  The ASF licenses this file
  ~ to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the
  ~ "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance
  ~ with the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at
  ~
  ~   http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
  ~
  ~ Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing,
  ~ software distributed under the License is distributed on an
  ~ "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY
  ~ KIND, either express or implied.  See the License for the
  ~ specific language governing permissions and limitations
  ~ under the License.
  -->

:::info
 Apache Druid supports two query languages: [Druid SQL](sql.md) and [native queries](querying.md).
 This document describes a query
 type that is only available in the native language.
:::

Time boundary queries return the earliest and latest data points of a data set. The grammar is:

```json
{
    "queryType" : "timeBoundary",
    "dataSource": "sample_datasource",
    "bound"     : < "maxTime" | "minTime" > # optional, defaults to returning both timestamps if not set
    "filter"    : { "type": "and", "fields": [<filter>, <filter>, ...] } # optional
}
```

There are 3 main parts to a time boundary query:

|property|description|required?|
|--------|-----------|---------|
|queryType|This String should always be "timeBoundary"; this is the first thing Apache Druid looks at to figure out how to interpret the query|yes|
|dataSource|A String or Object defining the data source to query, very similar to a table in a relational database. See [DataSource](../querying/datasource.md) for more information.|yes|
|bound   | Optional, set to `maxTime` or `minTime` to return only the latest or earliest timestamp. Default to returning both if not set| no |
|filter|See [Filters](../querying/filters.md)|no|
|context|See [Context](../querying/query-context.md)|no|

The format of the result is:

```json
[ {
  "timestamp" : "2013-05-09T18:24:00.000Z",
  "result" : {
    "minTime" : "2013-05-09T18:24:00.000Z",
    "maxTime" : "2013-05-09T18:37:00.000Z"
  }
} ]
```