Release Rollout Begins: May 8, 2016

Release Final & Download Available: May 19, 2016

• All Release Notes


• Legacy Features End-of-life Schedule

Preparing for Release

Please take notice of items marked with a as they indicate changes to existing functionality and may require your attention.

Notable Features

New Dashboard Look & Feel

More modern aesthetic through font tweaks, better use of whitespace, and removal of visual clutter. Notice the new styling for tiles, titles, editing, hovering and spacing.

You can read more about the design process for the new dashboards on our blog.

Single Value Visualization

Progress bar and callout number options have been added to single value visualizations.

Webhooks for Scheduled Looks & Dashboards (Labs)

Looker enables you to use webhooks, an great way to deliver data from a look or dashboard to other servers or services. This feature can be used to schedule passing data from Looker to Google Sheets, Amazon S3 bucket, Dropbox, and many other destination applications.

Additional Features by Section

Dashboards

New Dashboard Look & Feel

• 
  More modern aesthetic with font tweaks, better use of whitespace, and removal of clutter.


• 
  Single values read more naturally with titles on the bottom.

Dashboard Edit Mode

• Once activated, provides the ability to move and resize tiles; add or edit filters and notes; and add/remove tiles to the Dashboard.


• This also introduces notices when saving Looks that show which Dashboards will be impacted by the changes.


• This feature is derived from and replaces the Lock feature that was in Labs.

Headers and Free Text Boxes

Allows for title, subtitle, and body text to be inserted into dashboards. Can be resized and arranged just like a regular tile.

Better Tile Dragging and Resizing

• 
  Improved Dragging Logic makes it easier to move and resize tiles on dashboards.


• 
  More Flexible Sizing for Dashboard Tiles Tiles now exist on a 24-across grid instead of a 12-across grid.

Visualizations

Single Value Visualization Enhancements

• Callout Numbers.


• Progress Bars.


• 
  Dashboards auto-adjust text size so tiles all match.

Updated Column Truncation Logic for Table Visualizations

• Added seconds to the Dashboard Refresh function found in the gear menu on Dashboards.


• Browser tab titles now reflect dashboard names.

Explore

Table Calculations Updates

• 
  New date functions
  
  
  
  • 
    add_{interval}: add_seconds, add_minutes, …, add_years.
  
  
  • 
    trunc_{interval}: trunc_minutes, trunc_hours, …, trunc_years.
  
  
  
  


• 
  Date improvements. Comparison operators (>, <, >=, <=) now support dates.


• Improved field completions to include labels.


• 
  ANDs now takes precedence over OR. In the past, these statements evaluated left to right, so existing equations that didn’t use parentheses may change.


• Added the ability to filter on “is not” with day of week index.


• 
  Increased checking for type mismatches to avoid errors. However, this change also means that if you need to modify any expressions where you compare yes/no fields to strings.

Scheduling

Webhooks for Scheduled Looks (Labs)

• New option when scheduling a Look or dashboard to perform an HTTP POST to one or more servers instead of emailing the results. Learn More.


• Use a service like Zapier or a custom web server to upload data from Looker to an S3 bucket, Dropbox, an FTP server, etc. See example with DropBox.


• Introduces a new permission send_outgoing_webhook that is automatically given to all Looker Admins, and is required to use this functionality.

Scheduling Updates

• 
  Added a “Test” Button. Sends test email to the scheduler but not recipients.


• 
  Added a Formatting Option. New option to use formatted values in CSVs, TXTs, etc. (just like with downloads).


• 
  Timezones. Always explicitly set the timezone of a scheduled look and thus detach it from the application’s timezone. The scheduling modal defaults to the application timezone when creating a new schedule. Changing the application timezone thus effects all newly created plans, but not existing ones.


• 
  Scheduling Modal Changes. Full control over range of hourly option and improved UI.
  
  
  
  • Expanded the hourly range available.
  
  
  • Support for scheduling on a particular day of the week occurrence in the month was broken and has been removed. Current schedules set to run on a particular day of week and week of month will automatically be reassigned to the first day of the month.
  
  
  
  

LookML

• 
  Improved reliability of the LookML Generator. The LookML Generator now only generates for the requested schema instead of always generating for the default schema as well, resolving issues with duplicate field definitions and “exists” errors for view files.


• 
  New Value for Timeframes Parameter. Added day_of_year timeframe.


• 
  New Filter syntax for filtering on Quarters. 2015-Q2 will now work in Matches(Advanced).


• 
  LookML Deprecations. Learn More.
  
  
  
  • $$ substitution is now a legacy feature. It should be replaced with ${TABLE}.
  
  
  • Starting in 3.46, joins should only be defined inside an explore: definition. Defining a join: in any other location is deprecated.
  
  
  • The scoping parameter has been deprecated. Using scoping: false will now produce a LookML Validator error. Models should always use scoped field names.
  
  
  
  

Dialects

• 
  DashDB: Now supports PDTs and Query Killing.


• 
  Streaming Dialects. Aster, Data Virtuality, Exasol, Greenplum, Hive, Impala, Microsoft Azure SQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Presto, Spark, and Teradata. Learn More.
  


• 
  Spark: Fixed issue that could cause filter suggestions to generate invalid SQL


• 
  Presto:
  
  
  
  • Now possible to create views from multiple catalogs in PrestoDB, not just the one specified in the connection.
  
  
  • Fixed issue where connection tests were remaining in the Presto queue.
  
  
  
  


• 
  PostgreSQL Fixes:
  
  
  
  • Fixed an issue that caused filtering on a quarter to be incorrect.
  
  
  • Fixed an issue with slow queries using relative date filters.
  
  
  • Fixed an issue that caused uppercase letters to require quotes.
  
  
  
  

General Tweaks and Bug Fixes

• Added ability to search by models in Spaces.


• Instant Dashboards (Labs) now takes advantage of improved caching.


• Added a link to the instance in “Welcome to Looker” emails.


• Fixed a bug causing a slow resize of embedded pages.


• Fixed a bug on the LDAP Admin page that caused text values to overflow from form spaces.


• Fixed a bug for users of Microsoft Edge where visualizations didn’t fill space completely.


• Updated the explanatory tooltip on see_lookml permission the permissions page to show that it also allows users to see SQL.


• Updated the tooltip text on the Generate Project Model page.


• Fixed a bug where large result sets were being put into cache and causing outages.


• i__looker updates:
  
  
  
  • Added embed_user as a join to the user explore
  
  
  • Added sql_text to history explore
  
  
  • Added links to admin/queries as well as schedule plan.
  
  
  
  


• Fixed a bug where disabled series’ labels were remaining on vis.