Looker: Introduction, Features & More…

Looker is a business intelligence software and big data analytics platform that helps you explore, analyse and share real-time business analytics easily.

It is a one stop solution for all the analytical needs of your organization. It supports Modern BI & Analytics by creating dynamic dashboards for more in-depth analysis and giving teams access to reliable & accurate data that helps in making well informed-decisions. Looker powers Integrated Insights i.e the entire Looker platform works seamlessly with your existing BI setup and in-turn empower your teams to make more effective, data-informed decisions. The Data-Driven Workflows in Looker will definitely save you a lot of time & money by putting your data to work on your business by allowing you to take risk averse decisions backed by real facts about your business. Looker’s platform is agile enough to simulate any workflow. It allows you to create customised applications by providing a purpose built tool that users need, while creating data driven experiences that people love!!!

Super Advanced Business Intelligence & Analytics Tool

Looker is a very powerful Business Intelligence & Analytics software through which you can analyse data in real time. It’s not like you have to write some SQL Queries or any other code but its more of a no-code, click-drag & drop style software(from a user/analyst perspective).

We can create various types of reports & dashboards in Looker. Reports in Looker are called Looks. For example, if you create a Product Look(Or Report used interchangeably throughout this blog), then that Look will contain all the details about various Products in your warehouse(something like a table showing Product Name, Product Number, Available Stock, Per Unit Cost etc.).

Looker gives you full control of your data i.e in Looker you don’t have to create any ETL Layer that goes on top of your raw data, on which you perform aggregations and then finally create reports on top of that. No, actually nothing of that sort as it directly connects to your raw data and allows you to gain in-depth direct insights from the patterns in that core raw data which are usually left unexplored either because of the efforts in building an ETL layer or because of the actual picture getting a different colour in the transformation layer.

Build Customised Applications to support your business usecase

You can also create Data Workflow and Actions in Looker. For ex: you can send an email based on a certain business criteria/rule etc.

With Looker you can control the full UI dashboard experience i.e you can modify even the smallest detail or control the look & feel completely.

Looker allows you to create custom applications as well, completely based on your data, embedded with any specific workflow or action.

Highly Advanced Data Modeler — In-Database Architecture!

Looker has a very advanced Data Modeler supporting the entire ecosystem of looker that directly connects to the raw data without any intermediaries. Generally, you have an ETL layer i.e Extract-Transform-Load Layer in which you extract data from the source, transform it as per your defined business needs(making its representation more closer to the target) and loading it to the Target Layer and then building your visualisations using a Data Visualisation tool on top of that Target Layer. But, with Looker nothing like that as it directly connects to your raw data(transaction level data(may be), directly available at the source side) and perform analysis on top of that to drive real impactful business decisions backed by trusted facts directly from that raw source. Hence, Looker completely avoids the need for any extra storage or data movement by giving you direct access to all the underlying data.

Looker basically has a Semantic Layer Architecture which allows users to define standard business logic across businesses. Semantic Layer Architecture is, I believe, probably the best feature of Looker which is truly a differentiator from other BI Tools. It helps you in setting up a robust data security framework by allowing you to configure row level & column level security permissions. Being a Git Integrated IDE with version-control, it allows various teams to collaborate together on data app development.

You can use LookML, which is a language for describing dimensions, aggregates, calculations, and data relationships in a SQL database. Looker uses a model written in LookML to construct SQL queries against a particular database. It helps you in maintaining your data shared across all analysis at one centralised repository.

Cloud Based Platform — Its on cloud!!!

So, unlike other traditional BI Tools, for Looker everything is in your bowser, you don’t have to download anything. It’s all in cloud and all in browser. And this in turn allows you to maintain very sophisticated security settings to access your data.

In addition to all these, Looker has a very good partner ecosystem, so you can extend your research framework i.e it allows you to extend looker to more things other than reports & dashboards. You can create third party apps for looker and perform actions such as connecting it with Slack etc.

Sample Dashboard(Source)

Distinguished Features

All Business Intelligence(BI) tools allows you to create reports and dashboards but then how is Looker different and not only different but more powerful? The answer to this question lies in the unique distinguished features of Looker described below:

1. Completely Cloud Based Platform: Being a complete Cloud based platform Looker gives you a lot of flexibility as you don’t have to download any desktop software to use it. It’s super easy to deploy Looker and it makes processes and policies like permission & security a lot more easier & safer to implement.
2. Build data experiences at the speed of business: Looker actually enables developers to create customised data experiences using components and modules that can be connected together with services to build complex, powerful data products in a reusable format. You can accelerate data application development to help product developers deliver new types of data experiences fast and solve real impactful data use cases with Extension Framework.
3. Advanced Workflow Development: Looker has a very sophisticated workflow system that allows you to create reports and send them on a scheduled basis. You can also specify certain conditions so that only if those specific conditions are met then only those reports are delivered. Be alerted to issues before they become problems. In Looker, you can set alerts for dropping sales and fraudulent orders to ETL failures. You can also schedule reports to keep you completely up-to-date with your business performance. You can integrate your app ecosystem and automate your work with off-the-shelf services that helps users and apps take action on that data. You can also send and write-back data with Slack, Twilio and many more.
4. Extensive Partner Network: Looker has an extensive partner network and it is increasing more & more. It has a very vast third-party network ecosystem that you can use to extend it beyond just being a visualisation software. You can embed findings from Looker’s BI software with tools like Salesforce, Confluence, Sharepoint, and Powerpoint.
5. Supports Various Databases: Connecting directly to your database with no data extracts — and no software to download — means you have virtually no limit on the scale of the databases you can query. You can get data into looker from a vast variety of sources like Bigquery, SQL Server, Azure, AWS etc. It supports many SQL dialects as well. You can use T-SQL, Bigquery SQL etc.
6. In-Database Architecture : Looker has an In-database Architecture i.e it allows you to skip that ETL layer by directly connecting to your raw data i.e there is no ETL process to be maintained that reads the raw data, perform transformations/aggregations on top of it and sends it to the Looker, no nothing like that, as it connects directly to your raw data sources. Hence, it is super fast on any size of data.
7. Semantic Modelling Framework: Looker basically has a Semantic Layer Architecture which allows users to define standard business logic across businesses. This in turn helps in implementing an enterprise wide governance framework. It helps you in setting up a robust data security framework by allowing you to configure row level & column level security permissions.
8. Experience your data your way: Looker allows you to maintain complete control of your data. In Looker, you connect directly to your live, row-level data, and can use efficient visualizations to drill down from each dashboard for clarity into what’s happening in that particular moment.
9. Simple to use — No Code Software: One of the main features of Looker is that it is a No Code Software i.e for building visualisations in Looker you don’t have to write any code. It is implemented using click, drag & drop feature functionality. Looker’s powerful explore section gives users of all levels a drag-and-drop experience. This helps everyone to go beyond pre-made dashboards and reports to ask unique questions.
10. Git Integrated IDE with Version Control: It allows the teams to collaborate together on data app development using modern Git version-control and workflows. It helps in keeping your engineering team lean and efficient even as your product grows.
11. Get a better understanding of your data, your metrics, your business: Looker helps you in combining all your data under one umbrella for a more expansive view of your company’s metrics. Just define how different data sources of your business relate to one another and allow for smarter insights to get generated for you.
12. Get a 360° view of your customer: Get a deeper understanding of your customer’s interactions with unified data across various touch-points. Precise data brings the confidence to invest where it counts.
13. Tell a more visual story: Looker allows you to create easy-to-read reports and beautiful dashboards that helps users in exploring various patterns in data. Using Looker you can easily share data-rich visualisations anytime, from any device.

Looker Data Modelling

Looker intelligently scans your data and infers relationships between tables in your schema to build a basic model for you. This basic model uses the relationships already defined within your database to get you up to the speed. You can define your company’s business logic in Looker so that it can be used by the users. You have to define your data model once and you can reference it elsewhere to avoid writing the same SQL queries over and over again. As your business changes, globally updated logic and metrics can keep everyone aligned around consistent data.

LookML is truly a differentiator as it allows you to:

1. Modularize your code base so that you can easily reuse certain sections and expand it further efficiently.
2. Create dynamic logic(using liquid variables) for aggregations, joins, filters and others.
3. Configure row level and column level security on the data at enterprise scale.
4. You can restructure your data i.e apply aggregate functions etc. as per your business usecase.
5. You can apply conditional formatting for enhancing the look & feel of your data application by formatting color, fonts etc.

Looker Data Modelling is a three step process(this will be explained in great detail in the upcoming blogs. Please watch out for those!):

Step 1: Connect Looker to a database that supports SQL queries and automatically generate a basic LookML model.

Step 2: Collaborate with your team to build on your model, or deploy one of the 100+ pre-built LookML modelling patterns (Looker Blocks) to help accelerate development.

Step 3: Customize your model to reflect your company’s unique metrics and easily update and manage your reports from one place.

Keep Learning, Keep Growing!!!

References

1. Looker
2. Looker Business Intelligence