Can I use 3rd-side API as a datasource?

[ua_ulin-1630270]

Hi, how can bring my own data to Looker with RESTful API I already have? Or should the datasource always be a database only?

[Eric_Lyons]

Hi @ua_ulin-1630270,

Generally speaking you would want to write the data to a database,  you could even write it to a google sheet, then connect to the Google Sheet with a BigQuery connection. The connection process is detailed in this article.

Alternatively, if this would not work for your team, you could create a process that dynamically writes a derived table and unions the data together. There is this tool https://csv-sql.web.app/. In theory, you could use the Github API to update the derived table and use a similar syntax generated by the csv-sql app. You would still need a database connection to write the temp tables in. 

The Google Sheets method and the database would be far more robust options.

Please let us know how it goes!

Thanks,

Eric