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Looker 6.0 Release Notes

  • 17 October 2018
  • 9 replies
  • 303 views
hilary
Rank

Anticipated Deployment Dates


Release Rollout Begins: October 21, 2018

Release Final & Download Available: November 5, 2018




Release Highlights


In addition to general tweaks and enhancements, this release

comes with new and improved features in the following

categories. Read on for more detail.



Preparing for Release


Please take notice of items marked with a ⚡ as they indicate changes to existing functionality and may require your attention. For more information see the Legacy Feature Updates and Features by Section below.





System Configuration Notices


Take note of items marked with a 🛠 as they indicate changes to system configurations that may impact your ability to run the new release.





Introducing: Applications in Looker


Learn more or request a demo.



Notable Features


Refactored Cartesian Charts


A new visualization engine provides for bubble charts, greater flexibility when mixing series types, and smarter defaults for cartesian charts. It also lays the foundation for future developments. The visualization framework is generally available now, but could previously be enabled using the “Enhanced Visualizations” Labs feature.


03%20AM


New LookML Parameters


access_grant


Control data access at the field, explore, join, and view level based on user attributes with the new access_grant parameter.


06%20PM


duration


Using two timestamp fields, quickly and flexibly calculate duration with the new duration dimension group. Like the time dimension group, this parameter accepts the intervals field that allows Looker developers to specify the units that matter to their model.


42%20PM


Improved Color Picker


Allow your users to have complete information right off the bat when choosing color palettes for their visualizations. Default color palettes as dictated by the Admin panel are suggested first, followed by Looker’s out of the box color palettes.


14%20PM



Features by Section


LookML and Development




  • access_grant parameter. LookML developers can use new LookML parameters to adjust data access at the view, join, explore, and field levels.


  • New duration type dimension group. Learn more.


  • ⚡ Completely removed the “Allow the access_filter_fields parameter” Legacy Feature. User Attribute-based access filters are now the only method for row-level data security. Learn more.


  • ⚡ Disabled the “Native Derivied Tables Convert Dates and Yesnos to Strings” Legacy Feature. It may be temporarily reenabled on the Legacy Features page if needed to help your transition. Learn more.


Dashboards and Visualizations




  • Improved Color Picker. New color palette selection tool in visualizations menu. Learn more.


  • ⚡ Enhanced Visualizations. Enhanced visualizations have moved out of Beta and will now be available to all Looker customers. Legacy Visualizations are available as a legacy feature in the Admin panel. Learn more.


  • New Markdown Toolbar for Dashboard text tile creation. Learn more.


Dialects




  • MongoBI. Looker can now be used with MongoDB using the MongoDB BI connector. PDTs are not supported. Learn more.


  • Google Bigquery. Added support for Bigquery instances hosted outside the US and PDTs for clustered tables.


General Tweaks & Bug Fixes




  • Dashboards, Visualizations, and Explore

    • Looks are now edited in the page instead of in an additional “edit” modal.


    • ⚗Custom Visualizations are available to all Looker instances in the Labs panel. Learn more.


    • ⚗ Continued improvements to Custom Visualizations.

    • Fixed a bug where reference lines didn’t behave as expected with stacked percentage charts.

    • Fixed a bug where log scale y-axes lacked margins.

    • Mixed series types now automatically layer for visibility.

    • Fixed a bug where stacked charts legend order did not match visualizations.


    • ⚡ Reference lines now compute standard deviations based on population calculations rather than sample ones.




  • Platform and Administration


    • 🛠 Looker 6.0 requires Java 1.8 update 161+. Learn more.

    • Fixed a bug where the timezone picker did not change in embedded explores.




  • LookML and Development


    • ⚗ Continued improvements to experimental Custom Fields

    • Improved error messaging around references to unset user attributes.




  • Scheduling and Downloading

    • Fixed a bug where scheduling an excel file sometimes produced an error.

    • Fixed a bug where text visualizations did not render correctly when sent to email as a .png.



9 replies

Jonathan_Palmer
Userlevel 3

Regarding the access_grantparameter, is using/editing this restricted to admins? If not, couldn’t a user with LookML access just edit the parameter settings in their branch thereby getting access to something they shouldn’t be able to query?

kevin
Rank

Hey Jonathan, thanks for the question. You’re absolutely correct. I’ll clarify by mentioning that access_grant is not designed to be a system “permission” like the permissions you set in the admin panel; rather, it is designed as a developer tool and a feature of the LookML language.


If you’re looking to set up hard permissions to restrict access to data, database-side permissions combined with user attribute parameterized connections will be your best bet.

Groovy_Growler

Just out of curiosity, are these release notes being released via the RSS feed any more or no? The specific one I’d been using was:


https://discourse.looker.com/tags/release.rss

cutler
Rank
Userlevel 5
Badge

Oh neat, I didn’t realize you could set up RSS feeds based on tags. This was just an omission, I added just added the “release” tag.


We’d been using that tag to flag release notes and then figured a “Release Notes” category might be more useful. Good to know the tag is still worthwhile.

Groovy_Growler

Cool!! TYVM!!

JakeOsmond
Userlevel 2

This looks good! Do we know if there is yet the opportunity to combine both a stacked column visualisation and a line?

cutler
Rank
Userlevel 5
Badge

This release will allow you to combine stacked columns with lines, however the resultant “mixed series” visualization can’t have split axes. You’ll want to make sure the combined values are of reasonably similar scale (either naturally or with Calculation).

M
Userlevel 2

Were custom visualizations always free, or were they at one time a paid feature? Either way, very excited to start using them!

izzy
Userlevel 7
Badge +1

@mchatham



Custom visualizations have been free from the get-go! I believe there are some firms that developed their own proprietary visualizations and offer them for sale, but the use of the custom viz feature and the looker-provided examples have always been free 🙂

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