1. Launch Rill
To start, simply log in to Rill with any G-Suite account. You’ll find yourself in the Rill Cloud Console (RCC). RCC is our powerful web platform that allows users to harness the full potential of Apache Druid®.
You'll see the Datasets page as shown below, where you'll have "Viewer" permissions in a Workspace called "Public". We have already pre-loaded a few Apache Druid datasets in this Workspace—we will walk through how to query these later on.
If your organization subscribes to Rill, your organization will get their own private Workspace with customizable user permissions. For example, some users may have “Viewer” privileges, while others have “Editor” or “Admin" privileges.
With a Rill subscription, you can also load your own datasets using either standard Druid connectors or our new Rill connectors. For example, Rill provides a BigQuery connector which allows you to parallel load data quickly and easily from your BigQuery tables.
2. Click on a Dataset to view its overview
When you click on a dataset, you'll see the Dataset Overview. The first section, shown below, displays a chart showing the number of rows in the dataset by timestamp. Druid is purpose built for high performance on time series data, so when a dataset is loaded, a timestamp column is almost always designated. Scrolling down further in this Dataset Overview, you'll see additional useful information about the columns in your dataset.
3. Perform a query in the Apache Druid Console
Click on "Druid Console" in the top right of Rill's Dataset detail view to go to the Apache Druid console. You will notice that the look of the app changes from a white background to a grey background. This is because you are now at the Apache Druid query console.
Apache Druid is an open source data store that enables fast decision making on real time data. Rill encapsulates Druid in a secure managed service that brings you all the power of Druid with just a single login.
In the top panel of the console, type a simple query:
select * from citibike_tripdata
Then click “Run”
You should see the output display in the bottom panel, like this:
It’s as easy as that! You can perform queries here at the SQL prompt, you can connect best of breed analytics tools such as Tableau and Looker, or you can power your custom application via the Druid API.
4. Learn more about Rill and Apache Druid
Apache Druid is open source. You can download it on the official Apache Druid website. To use Druid in the enterprise, your cluster will need security, configuration, and optimization. For information on how to configure and tune a Druid cluster, check out these resources on the Druid website: authentication, security, configuration, and scaling and tuning.
Rill provides a managed service that scales Druid on demand to provide low latency queries at low cost. The more queries your team performs, the greater the price performance advantage of Druid over other data warehouses such as BigQuery and Snowflake. These warehouses continue to be excellent solutions for cold data, but for real-time data where you need low latency, Rill’s managed Druid service will be have higher performance at a lower price point.
At Rill, we encapsulate the complexity of Druid behind the curtain of a simple managed service. We are making it easy for you to get data into and out of Rill, providing simple connectors to databases such as BigQuery for easy-in, and integration with best of breed analytics tools such as Tableau and Looker for easy-out. Let us show you on your own data what Rill and Druid can do for you!
If your team wants to leverage the power and performance of Druid with no DevOps overhead, please get in touch.
