[APRIL 2024] Looker Customer Newsletter - The latest updates on Looker and more!

[marout]

April 2024 - Product Update

Product Updates and Enhancements:

Introducing Gemini in Looker to bring intelligent AI-powered BI to everyone
With Gemini in Looker, your relationship with your data and reporting goes from a slow-moving and high-friction process, limited by gatekeepers, to a collaborative and intelligent conversation - powered by AI. The deep integration of Gemini models in Looker brings insights to the major user flows that power your business, and establishes a single source of truth for your data with consistent metrics. Learn More.

Complimentary Looker Studio Pro licenses available to Looker users
Announced at Google Cloud Next 2024, Looker customers can opt-in to add a Looker Studio Pro license for every Looker Viewer, Standard, or Developer user license they have. This brings the self-service flexibility of Looker Studio Pro to even more Looker users, at no additional cost, and bring access to our full suite of Gemini in Looker capabilities. Learn more.

See the latest updates from our Help Center for Looker Studio here, and for Looker here.

Google Cloud Next Looker Session Recordings

Video: Harness AI for better business intelligence: What's new and how to apply it
Gemini in Looker has made the most complex data actions simple, letting you chat with your business data. The latest advancements in Google's business intelligence (BI) suite bring insights to your users and customers, and form the basis of your own data-driven applications. Watch now.

Video: Talk with your business data using generative AI
Getting insights from your business data should be as easy as asking Google. That is the mission for Looker – instant and insightful, able to alert you when it really matters and to guide you to impactful decisions faster than ever, powered by the most important information: yours. Join this session to learn about how AI is reshaping our relationship with data, and how Looker is leading the way. Watch now.

Video: Unleash AI insights with Looker and Google Workspace in minutes
The combination of Looker and Google Workspace is your data dream team. Learn how to automatically generate Google Slides from Looker, how to generate reports from Google Sheets, and bring business intelligence into the flow of work. Watch now.

Video: How small businesses use data to drive value and profitability using Looker
For many small businesses today, data is still viewed as a cost center and operational expense. However with solutions such as BigQuery, Looker, and Gemini in Looker, companies have the ability to transform their data teams into value drivers and direct contributors to the bottom line. Watch now.

Video: How BigQuery Omni and Looker mean no more data silos
You can query, connect, and report on your data insights across clouds, including AWS and Azure, with BigQuery Omni and Looker. Reduce costly copying and customization and get answers quickly, so you can get back to work. Watch now.

Data Cloud Spotlight:

All 218 things we announced at Google Cloud Next ‘24 – a recap
Last year, we talked about the exciting possibilities of generative AI, and this year it was great to showcase how customers are now using it to transform the way they work. At Next ‘24, we featured 300+ customer and partner AI stories, 500+ breakout sessions, hands-on demos, interactive training sessions, and so much more. It was a jam-packed week, so we’ve put together a summary of our announcements which highlight how we’re delivering the new way to cloud. Learn more.

Video: What’s next for data analytics in the AI era
With the surge of new generative AI capabilities, companies and their customers can now interact with systems and data in new ways. Learn the latest innovations for data analytics and BI, and why tens of thousands of organizations are fueling their journey with BigQuery and Looker. Watch now.

Video: How MLB create granular cost insight and application insight with observability analytics
See how MLB optimizes their expenses with prebuilt templates attendees can use to plug in their own Google Cloud data. This video explores how to export billing data to BigQuery; how to use metrics in observability analytics to join with billing and create a granular cost breakdown; and how to use this data to save money, including a demo and example template that you can immediately apply to your production environment. Watch now.

[Lauren_vdv]

Exciting updates! Thanks for putting this together @marout 👏

[Roderick]

Wow - so many exciting things going on with Looker & Looker Studio Pro! Thanks for the update @marout.

[skywalker]

Do these "Great updates" apply for Customer-hosted Looker Instance?

[marout]

@skywalker Great question! For the Gemini in Looker features many of them are in Looker Studio which does not apply to the Customer Hosted part of Looker. For the LookML Assistant and Advanced Visualization Assistant they are not available at this time on customer hosted instances. 

As for the Looker Studio Pro license I do not think they are available for customer hosted based on the documentation I see here but I am reaching out to the team leading this project to confirm.  

[skywalker]

Thank you. @marout 
Do these new feature need Vertex, BigQuery engine?
(We use MS Sql Server to store data)

[Vitaliy_Skachko]

Still nothing valuable. 
1. No LOD-like expressions (like in Tableau). 
2. No custom grouping
3. No way to have color measure  (like in Tableau). 
4. No ability to manage  Cross-Filtering (it's still completely unmanageable and thus useless)
5. No mouse selection filtering

Keep adding more bleeding edge feature while not having even low tech. 

[Diepnam]

Absolutely agree. Rather than make functionality improvements (i.e creating a tornado graph), not being able to flexibility adjust tile sizes and instead be forced to be locked into a grid, every tech company wants to promote AI.

[MarcoSol]

Have you tried the config editor? https://cloud.google.com/looker/docs/chart-config-editor Released last month. 

[Vitaliy_Skachko]

This one? 

Sorry, I don't want to spend my time playing with it. BI tools are designed to save time of analysts rather then waste it.
Looker, instead of revising their visual system and making it more convenient and easy to use, again made some workaround. 

[idaok]

100% agree. The data viz is still shockingly basic.

[Marco_Playtomic]

Everything sounds interesting but I feel we are still struggling to cover the basics:

1. Flexible Period-over-Period UX (Looker Studio is much better to compare to previous period)
2. Lineage of views, models, explores
3. Metadata updates with BigQuery (descriptions are a pain to update manually)
4. Queries generated are often not optimised for BigQuery (why so many sub-selects, especially in WHERE clauses?)

[ReggieLyons]

How does one actually enable Gemini for Looker?

[MarcoSol]

So the post is a bit deceiving. The Gemini features available right now are actually in Looker Studio. Looker instances will receive this as an update later from my understanding.

You can already make use of Gemini in Looker with the a few extension frame works "looker blocks" .  
- Looker Explorer Assistant (think text-to-explore generator) : https://github.com/looker-open-source/looker-explore-assistant
- Looker Dashboard Summarization : https://github.com/looker-open-source/dashboard-summarization 
- Vertex Ai Actions:  https://github.com/looker-open-source/vertex-ai-actions . Can do stuff like writing marketing copy for top products etc.
- Semantic Search: https://github.com/looker-open-source/bqml_semantic_search_block 

Note Open Source here means the code for the extensions is freely available. You still need Looker, BQ (Or have to adjust the code) and Vertex AI to get it working. 

Hope this helps. 

[ReggieLyons]

Thank you @MarcoSol, I suspected it was something along those lines - it's a shame they couldn't just include that information up front. Calling the post "deceiving" is a very generous way of putting it!
Do you have any idea on the timelines for when 'later' is expected to be?

As for the other steps, cheers for that. I had looked into that recently but need to dig a bit deeper on it now so.

[MarcoSol]

So I know on the explore Assistant the guys behind spectacles are holding webinar via LinkedIn tomorrow : https://www.linkedin.com/events/7189561968339398656/about/ . 

As far as, when the above tools would come plug-and-play natively to looker I have not heard a specific time. Do note that there are a lot of things that need to be considered for this. There are plenty of horror stories from some LLM training on internal data and thus being able to access otherwise sensitive data like salary information etc. I think the "open source" solution above actually have a thoughtful approach on how it's deployed and how the access and permissions are arranged. It's what you would call federated access, meaning the model can only see what the person invoking the model can see. Also the underlying data is again saved on a BQ data set within your project or org. 

When GCP deploys a similar proprietary integration in Looker, not only the access but also model outputs and tuning parameters will have to be kept within the company's domain. I suspect it's not so much a model capability constraint it's more so a mature data security issue they need to solve. And the proper training and guides have to be in place. 

This same risk is very different for Looker Studio with very limited Data Governance capabilities and very different promises on security. The data you run through the Looker Studio General Preview Conversational Assistant, where does it go? How does Gemini consume this? Where are the replies saved? I would be careful with just turning on an LLM onto my stack. 

[ReggieLyons]

Those are exactly the sort of concerns I'm seeking to address before turning anything on!
I've spoken with the guys behind spectacles recently actually. Good reminder on the event as I had forgotten about it.

Thanks for taking the time to respond @MarcoSol, I appreciate it.

[skywalker]

When LookML codes converted to SQL codes, so many UNnecessary 'Group by columns'.
The performance issue is Big Negative.
Also, the time zone conversion is very complex in the Looker generated SQL codes.

[skywalker]

Hey @marout 

Hope you are well,

to get this "benefits" from these updates, do we need ", BigQuery and Vertex AI "?

Our looker is customer hosted. We use sql server as database. please advise