What is Looker

What is Looker?

Looker is a software and platform that helps in business intelligence and data analytics by analyzing, sharing, and exploring business analytics with ease. It has a web-based interface that eliminates the need to install desktop applications. It has a good user interface. It enables users to create dynamic and interactive dashboards. You can also use different parameters to create them for receiving alerts. You can also embed analytics and perform the scheduling and automation of report distribution. It is now part of the Google Cloud Platform and works well with different datasets. It uses data modeling to power different analytics usage, i.e., data management, analytics, data visualization, e.t.c.

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Why is Looker used?

Some of the reasons why Looker is used include the following:

Good insights. Looker enables users to generate good insights from data using different functions. The insights help in initiating different conversations around the data.

It increases performance and reduces costs. The Looker has many features that enable users to use them in their applications and projects to improve the performance of the machines. It reduces the costs and makes it easy to scale any deployments.

When you need to build applications faster, you use Looker. It has UI components that you can incorporate into your workflows. It speeds development and makes the data experience good. Once you improve the development processes, the revenue increases.

History of Looker

Look got started by Lloyd Tabb and Ben Porterfield in 2012 at Santa Cruz, based in California. Their companies worked with other companies like Netscape, Luminate, and Liveops in building different software. They built Looker using LookML, which helps define relationships in databases to help company teams perform different actions like exploring, downloading, and saving data without using SQL. When they built Looker for the first time, it acted as a business intelligence platform where it worked with databases like Teradata, Vertica, Netezza, and Amazon Redshift. In August 2013, they raised their SERIE A funding from Redpoint Ventures of around $18M. They raised their seed round from First Round and PivotNorth Capital $2M.

They raised their SERIE B fundings of $30M in 2015 and hired Jen Grant as the marketing manager. In 2016, they raised SERIE C funding of $48M from Kleiner Perkins and had around 400 customers. 

In 2016, the company released a book called Winning With Data, authored by Frank Bien, the Looker CEO, and Tomasz Tunguz, from Redpoint Ventures. In 2017, they raised SERIE D funding of $81.5M from Capital G. 

In 2018, they got SERIE E funding of $103M from Premji Invest. In 2019, Google later bought Looker for $2.6 billion, and the deal got finalized in 2020. Their CEO Frank Ben left the company in 2022.

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When do we use Looker?

Looker is one of the best business intelligence platforms that exist in the data science field right now. You use Looker when you need better analytics. Most of its analytics as it uses Looker Blocks to customize the company's needs using different functions. You also use Looker when your organization has many members. If you have a company that has many employees, you can try Looker for good results. When you require instant and real-time data, it is good to use Looker. It provides instant analytics, saving you a lot of time. We also use it depending on the type of infrastructure the company uses, and you have to understand how it integrates with your application.

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How to Install Looker?

There are several steps one has to follow when installing Looker.

When installing Looker on your machine. It has to meet some requirements. Some of the requirements include a 1.2 GHz CPU,2GB swap file, 10 GB disk space,8 GB RAM, Linux, Java OpenJDK and OpenJDK latest versions, libssl, use of TCP PORT 9999 to allow inbound traffic, libssl, among others.

• Ensure you enable the Network Time Protocol. Create encryption keys for the databases and data. 
• Install the app using the sudo groupadd looker command.
• Create a new user using the following command

sudo useradd -m  -g looker  teamse

• Ensure you are using the looker user, not the root user, as below

sudo su - teamse

• Create a new subdirectory under the home directory

mkdir ~/lookerjob

• Navigate to the directory

cd lookerjob

• Confirm you are in the right directory

pwd

• Download the JAR Looker files, and you have to ensure they are of the same version to avoid instability.
•  Download the startup scripts from Github and locate the Looker script and JAR looker files in the /lookerjob directory.
• The startup and jar looker files have the same file format, i.e., looker-y.y.y, whereby y.y.y is the version number. Now, we remove the version numbers and remain with looker-y.y.y and looker-dependencies-y.y.y.jar to looker.jar and looker-dependencies.jar, respectively.
• Most startup scripts handle how much Java memory can get assigned to Looker. You can change the settings using the memory settings.
• To make the startup script executable, we change the permissions to 0750 using the following command:

chmod 0750 looker

• Now you have to start the Looker process using the Shell when you are the user using the command below

./lookerjob start

• For any startup troubleshooting, you can use the command below:

java -jar looker.jar --help or java -jar looker.jar help

• Open your preferred browser and enter the  https://nameofhost:9999, where the nameofhost represents the DNS name of the Looker host.
• Input the license key, your name, email, and password to create the account.
• Create a DNS record for your application by adding Looker.[domainname].com to the DNS records of the server.
• Deploy Looker using tools like Ansible and Chef.
• If you use VMware guest for running Java virtual machines, you change some settings to improve performance.

Most of the Looker use HyperSQL as a database, but you can also connect your preferred database like SQL. Now, the Looker set up is  successful.

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Pros and Cons of Looker?

Some of the Pros of looker include:

• It has good data governance due to its workflows supporting all KPIs and making it simple to create dashboards.
• It is easy to scale.
• It is easy to model and enables users to change their databases.
• It supports CI/CD and automated testing, which improves the DevOps culture.
• It supports version control where you can use git to manage the company projects.
• It has a good community that provides support when you have issues.
• It has an API that you can use for several functionalities like accessing data, managing users, e.t.c.
• You can access it on your favorite browser, which removes the hassle of installing other additional software.

Cons of using Looker include:

• It requires a good investment, making it work for big companies, not startups, and a lot of learning to master how to use the tool.
• When using Looker, it works perfectly when you work as a team to get the best results. Especially during the data modeling process.
• When you want to move from Looker to another tool, for example, to Tableau, the whole process can be tough.
• When working with visualizations, it can be tough sometimes to produce good results.
• It can affect you, for example, if you have a startup and you use it. It requires many activities like governance and scalability, which in turn affect the performance.
• When handling some tasks, it takes more time compared to other tools. For example, when doing some calculations, you will have to write code that you will use for those tasks, there are no functions for that.

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