Getting Started with Looker

“Just as Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, Looker’s is to do the same for your business data so that you can build insight-powered workflows and applications.”

This is how the Welcome to Looker page greets you. Looker is one of the products of the Google Cloud BI family. The Google Cloud BI family also includes Looker Studio (Free and Pro versions), which was created by Google in 2016 and used to be called Google Data Studio. This book focuses on Looker, and Looker Studio won't be covered.

Looker is an advanced business intelligence (BI) solution acquired by Google in 2019. It is part of Google Cloud Platform. In order to start using it, you need to fill in the Contact Sales form and wait for the free trial to be created for you by someone from the Google Cloud sales team. At the time of writing this book, it is still the process to follow.

You can contact the sales team to get some help with your Looker exploration, but this book aims to make you autonomous in your Looker journey.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following recipes:

• Getting access to Looker
• Providing access to your team
• Connecting to data in Looker
• Building a LookML project
• Connecting Looker to Git
• Making and saving changes in views
• Creating a LookML model and an Explore
• Building Looks from Explores
• Creating a dashboard from a Look