Let us discuss how Looker is a Business Intelligence
(BI) software and big data analytics platform that helps business users to explore, analyze
and share real-time data analytics easily. As a browser-based, Software as a Service
(SaaS) platform, Looker connects directly to SQL databases. For example, you can connect Looker to:
Other SaaS applications such as Salesforce, Mailchimp, and Zendesk. Heavy read-write operations in transactional
databases such as Oracle, IBM Db2, and Microsoft SQL Server. Business planning tools such as SAP, NetSuite,
and Oracle. And web analytics products such as Google
Analytics or Adobe Analytics. These are just a few examples. Looker is multi-cloud and supports over 65
database dialects. One major benefit of Looker is its agile modeling
layer, which can save data teams and business analysts time that would otherwise be spent
manually writing and editing SQL queries. Looker’s agile modeling layer allows developers
to define, through Looker Modeling Language or LookML, how the database is structured
and how the tables and columns relate to each other. A useful way to think about LookML is that
it is an abstraction layer for SQL that developers use to tell Looker what data to use from the
connected database and how it should interpret that data. As users explore and analyze the data, Looker
uses the defined LookML models to automatically generate SQL SELECT queries to send to the
database and return the appropriate results. Another benefit of Looker is data governance,
which means that you can define a single source of truth for data that everyone in the organization
can understand and trust. In Looker, you can enforce various types of
data security and governance through the Looker user interface (UI), such as assigning specific
user roles, as well as through LookML, such as providing access to specific fields or
rows of data. To help organizations disseminate data, Looker
can surface and expose query results in several ways. The first is through the web interface. This can be in the form of Explores (which
are report-builder interfaces), Looks (which are standalone reports or visualizations),
and dashboards (which contain multiple visualizations). Another way is through scheduled data deliveries,
such as sending Looks and dashboards to specific email addresses or Cloud Storage buckets on
a one-time or recurring basis. Explores, dashboards, and Looks can also be
embedded within other websites or applications. Last, Looker provides a REST API that allows
you to retrieve, analyze, and transform data and metadata directly from the Looker platform. Looker's unique architecture provides a rich
development framework that is built to support enterprise-grade workflows and help your users
and tools access the most accurate and up-to-date version of your organization’s data. With this unified view into your organization’s
data, you, as a LookML developer, can curate data experiences to ensure that both people
and systems get the data they need, how and when they need it.