About the MapR Sandbox
This tutorial uses the MapR Sandbox, which is a Hadoop environment pre-configured with Drill. MapR includes Drill as part of the Hadoop distribution. The MapR Sandbox with Drill is a fully functional single-node cluster that can be used to get an overview of Drill in a Hadoop environment. Business and technical analysts, product managers, and developers can use the sandbox environment to get a feel for the power and capabilities of Drill by performing various types of queries.
Hadoop is not a prerequisite for Drill and users can start ramping up with Drill by running SQL queries directly on the local file system. Refer to Apache Drill in 10 minutes for an introduction to using Drill in local (embedded) mode.