Item: Looker
Rating: 9
Author: Adam Rhuberg

Overall Satisfaction with Looker

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Looker is being used by dozens of people throughout our organization to quickly and easily access data from our data warehouse without needing to know or understand SQL or have direct access to the database itself. More than 100 dashboards have been built by our internal Looker developers to meet the needs of every functional unit's weekly, monthly, and quarterly reporting requirements. All of our end-users have quick and immediate access to the data underlying any of the dashboards and can self-serve ad hoc data requests without needing support from the analytics team.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Enables simple sharing of reports and data views throughout the ogranization.
Allows for immediate on-demand querying of the data warehouse without direct access to the data warehouse of knowledge of SQL.
Provides the ability to embed data modeling rules into the platform to make sure that "Revenue" (as an example) means the same thing to every person and is calculated with consistent logic every time.

Cons

New user on-boarding requires some dedicated training. It's not an easy tool to pick up and use immediately.
Visualization customizations are still a bit cryptic. Most end users can't figure out how to change a data series' color, for example. It's not intuitive.
The ease of development actually makes for a potential nightmare down the road if too many people have developer privileges. There are a lot of potential issues over the longer term if you don't introduce adequate safeguards right at initial implementation.

Alternatives Considered

Tableau Desktop,Domo,GoodData,Birst,Mixpanel

Because Looker actually functions as a database querying tool, there's no need for building extensive ETL processes that require you to pre-configure every aggregation and dimensional cut you would ever want to do in your BI front-end, it avoids the long and expensive implementation process many of these other tools require. Another great benefit of this architecture is that the tool makes for rapid and flexible data exploration that doesn't require additional developer time - just because no one else has created a specific report before doesn't mean it can't be done quickly and easily by a business user with no knowledge of the underlying data structures. Looker is also a great value compared to some of these other tools.

Data Integration

Data source connectivity is easy within Looker, but combing and merging data from disparate sources is not a feature currently available. Each different data source effectively lives in its own space because the tool queries the underlying data source live via a single connection.

Collaboration and Sharing

Ease of sharing is great. I love that any report that has been built can be shared via URL, regardless of whether that report is itself saved to any particular collaboration space or dashboard. Even and ad hoc data pull can be shared with a link.

Likelihood to Recommend

If your organization relies on a team of analysts to write SQL every time a new data request is submitted with output expected in the form of Excel spreadsheets and charts, this tool can help avoid that process altogether and free up analysts to do more value-added work instead of just being a glorified back-end data pulling team. I don't think it would be very useful if a company is already using an enterprise-wide BI tool, especially one that might encompass both an ETL-like modeling layer and flexible visualization tools.

Looker Feature Ratings

Comments

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Looker is an ideal data exploration tool with room to improve as an enterprise-level BI solution

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