Looker Review - Review 2022

Looker is a self-service business intelligence (BI) tool that is focused on solving one detail problem: keeping runway of your various Structured Query Language (SQL)-based and NoSQL Big Information sources. Looker, which begins at $3,000 per month for x users, actually comes to the BI world from a unlike direction than many of its competitors in this review roundup, including Editors' Choice honor winners Microsoft Power BI (Visit Site at Microsoft Ability BI) and Tableau Desktop (Visit Store at Tableau) . Instead of trying to make pretty visualizations, Looker forces yous to sympathise your data structures and relationships from the SQL command line.

Bear with me here for a moment because this is actually a vivid idea. Yes, at that place are a lot of tools that can take your Microsoft Excel ($85.32 at Amazon) spreadsheets and make interesting graphics, but Looker doesn't do Microsoft Excel and its visualizations are more of an reconsideration than a destination. Yes, Looker has information dashboards and ways to edit your charts to make them more than compelling, simply what you will generally stop up doing in Looker is spending fourth dimension writing SQL code to examine your data and collaborate beyond your visitor to build better data models well-nigh your business organization. Information technology is a subtle only important distinction and requires some solid SQL knowledge if y'all are going to get the nigh out of this tool.

If you lot run your business concern using 27 dissimilar Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, so skip Looker and look elsewhere. But if y'all have at least ane SQL expert on staff, then Looker volition benefit your concern past letting yous leverage this expertise into more attainable information for everyone else to apply. One problem with many BI tools is that ordinary users still take to depend on information analysts to practise some of the heavy lifting of model building and analysis. Looker frees up users who aren't data nerds, assuasive them to spend less time fiddling with the tool and more time exploring their information.

Looker is proficient in both SQL and Web-based data, which is no pocket-size feat. Information technology supports more 25 different variations, including support for Google BigQuery, Hive, Spark, and Vertica. This isn't equally broad a accomplish every bit Domo (2,000.00 Per User Per Twelvemonth at Software Advice) just understandable given that the production is adequately new. However, it is already beingness used in some very large installations, with hundreds of seats consuming petabytes of monthly data.

Looker is exclusively a Web service running in your browser. The app is responsive so there is a unmarried version that will support tablets and smartphones too as desktops and laptops. At that place is no boosted software to download, and information technology ran fine on a variety of browsers (including Microsoft Edge) in my tests. You can place limits on the number of rows displayed while you are building your model and so you lot won't overwhelm your browser with your queries. When y'all are ready to analyze your unabridged data prepare, it is a simple operation to remove these limits. There are no actual limits on the concrete size of the data prepare that you can work on; some Looker customers routinely examine databases with millions of rows.

Collaboration and Visualization

Looker offers left-side menus for general activities such as exploring your data, administering your business relationship, and creating new workspaces. To create visualizations, there'south a display of the data schema where yous tin can elevate and drop elements and meet what SQL code is generated as a consequence. The app has 3 dissimilar access roles: Administrator, Programmer, and ordinary User. That is non equally granular as Tableau Desktop but is, at least, a good beginning.

And while Looker'south SQL focus makes information technology sound like information technology's a tool aimed mainly at technical personnel, the visitor is working hard to brand the software feasible to a more general audience, too. From a straight data visualization perspective, Looker has become much more flexible over the concluding year, for case, allowing multi-sized objects on the dashboard and adding a new mapping feature. And, different many BI tools that focus primarly on exporting their visualizations for use in other apps, Looker actually placed some emphasis on importing visualizations, too, allowing customers to use Javascript to import outside visuals into Looker dashboards or simply import an outside paradigm and overlay Looker plot data on acme. Looker also supports Webhooks, which let y'all use Looker data objects as part of 3rd-party workflows, like those created with Zapier.

Along those lines, Looker shines when it comes to collaboration. Each Looker project or group of data analyses tin be saved every bit a Git project and then individuals can track changes to their SQL lawmaking bases; it'southward an innovative, natural way for developers to work together. You tin can also consign your assay to one of v different locations: a spider web URL, a piece of embed code for either your data or the visualization for any webpage, a information table that can be dynamically updated for a Google spreadsheet, or a query file suitable for Microsoft Excel. If your system uses Slack (Visit Site at Slack) , there's even a Looker Slackbot that allows users to make live queries and receive visualizations back immediately as part of a Slack conversation. Chartio (Visit Site at Chartio) charges extra for the embedding code; Looker includes everything in a unmarried price. Having all of these sharing methods ways that Looker tin become more valuable the more people within a corporation use it. The other BI tools could learn from Looker's example past providing this wealth of collaboration methods, as well.

Learning Looker

Looker'due south biggest challenge is learning how to mix and friction match SQL with its own LookML data modeling language. Yous use both to build your models; you can start with SQL code and have the LookML modeling routine build your visualizations from this lawmaking, then add more SQL lawmaking to refine your overall analysis. This sounds more complicated than information technology is and, if y'all already know SQL, it won't be an issue. Actually, let me rephrase that: reading the LookML code that is produced will assistance you optimize and learn how to write improve SQL queries (another benefit of using this tool).

Looker has plenty of learning tools to assist y'all effigy things out, including its own video aqueduct on Vimeo with more than than 100 dissimilar short screencast lessons and alive video recordings. In that location is as well a moderate level of online documentation that includes several "puzzles" that volition motivate users to larn more about the production.

LookML is extensible with many different features. Get-go is a serial of what Looker calls "Blocks" that support integrations with leading Spider web products such as Salesforce.com (Visit Site at Salesforce.com) , Snowplow, and Zendesk (Gratis Trial at Zendesk) , equally well as being able to create a variety of functions such every bit determining differences between repeat and non-repeat customers, doing A/B webpage tests, creating sequences of transactions, and other powerful analyses. In that location is also a series of preprogrammed analytical patterns such as creating side-by-side comparisons and reporting on active users past a detail time period. All of these tools make it easier to distribute and embed Looker dashboards inside other products and rapidly build some very complex models.

Many of these features are documented on Discourse, Looker's give-and-take forum. This is also the place where customers tin suggest new features they would like to run into besides as access in-person tutorials. You will discover an entire learning environment of numerous sample information sets on Looker'due south website. Once you take a valid Looker login credential, y'all can freely admission all of this content.

Pricing and Versions

Looker's price ranges from $three,000 to $5,000 per month for ten users. Additional users are $l per month. This puts information technology amidst the more than expensive tools in this review roundup—and probably out of reach of the smallest businesses. Looker comes either as a hosted service or as a Java Archive parcel that tin run on your ain servers if you want that control.

If your business organisation generates Large Data and yous have a SQL guru on staff, so Looker is a powerful BI tool of choice. Its mix of SQL and LookML muscle with drag-and-driblet information elements is impressive as are its extensive collaboration options.

Additional reporting on this review by David Strom .

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Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/small-business-reviews-and-price-comparisons-from/9217/looker-review

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