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Looker 6.16 Release Notes

anakarina.lance
Rank

Anticipated Deployment Dates


Release Rollout Begins: July 7, 2019

Release Final & Download Available: July 19, 2019



Please note that comments on this thread are not formally tracked. For help requests and issue reports please open a separate conversation or reach out via the Looker Help Center to start a specific conversation.


🇯🇵Release Notes in Japanese 🇯🇵



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.





Beta and Experimental Labs Features


The following new and improved experimental and beta features are marked with a ⚗:





Notable Features





  • IDE Folders


    Allows significantly better organization in LookML projects. The feature is meaningful to Git and therefore changes requires commit/merge. In addition, Include statements need to capture the file’s path. Opt-in via project settings for existing projects! Learn more


    folders
    48%20AM





  • ⚗ Content Curation Beta (Boards)


    Available in the Labs section of Looker, this solution allows people to easily organize dashboards and Looks for a team or initiative and provide guidance with markdown links. This solution works in tandem with folders (Spaces). It allows users to organize content for a temporary or permanent team or initiative without moving the underlying content, which is stored in folders. Learn more


    board%20example





  • ⚗ Alerts Labs Beta


    Create alerts directly from a dashboard tile. Ability to set up threshold-based conditions (greater than, less than, changes by, increases, etc) and receive notifications via email when a condition is met. Learn more


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Features by Section


Dashboards, Visualizations, and Explore




  • ⚗ Table-Next Labs Beta Improvement.



Platform and Administration




  • ⚡ Timeout session. The session timeout warning will now be displayed two minutes before timing out.


  • Inactivity Logout Session Setting. Session settings can be modified to force users to be logged out of a session after 15 minutes of inactivity. Activity is defined as a user clicking anywhere in Looker or touching the screen in the case of touchscreens, or typing anything into Looker. Learn more


LookML and Development



  • Introduced a method to preserve number formatting, regardless of what locale-based settings a user may have. Learn more.


Dialects




  • ⚡ Upgraded Snowflake driver (v3.8.4). Addresses Snowflake issues caused by prior versions of the driver. Learn more


  • Qubole Dialect. Qubole Quantum. The Qubole Presto dialect Qubole Presto Service has been rebranded and is now available as a separate dialect in the dropdown menu as Qubole Quantum.


General Tweaks and Bug Fixes


LookML and Development



  • Addressed an issue where value_format_name or value_format parameters were not being respected in the field being extended. It was taking the parameter definition of the view the field was extended from.

  • Improved an issue where utilizing non-alphanumeric characters upon configuring a new model that led to a 500 error.

  • Modified how the datatype parameter of type date interacted with a measure within the project IDE.

  • Addressed the inconsistent alignment of git metadata displayed in the project settings page.

  • Addressed LookML Validation Error Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property '1' of null

  • Addressed an issue in which a persisted explore with the parameter sql_always_where defined using user attributes was pulling incorrect data from the cache.


Dashboards, Visualizations, and Explore



  • Addressed the ability for the x-axis to respect number localization.

  • Addressed number formats mismatching between different viz types.

  • Addressed an issue that was resulting in drills displaying no results when null values were set to a type of string.


Scheduling and Downloads



  • Addressed an issue that was causing look and dashboards rendering to fail.


API



  • Addressed an issue where the all_lookml_models() and lookml_model(lookml_model_name) API endpoints would return an empty array with explores that required access grants.


Platform and Administration



  • Addressed an issue where editing the user attribute for a group did not allow them to enter a string. Instead, it only displayed a dropdown of options.


Dialects



  • Addressed a Snowflake JDBC driver version 3.8.3 issue that would return a NullPointerException message when a queried result set was larger than could be held in one result chunk. Queries returned a blank error message to Looker.

17 replies

B
Userlevel 5
Badge

These are massive. I can’t wait for the beta features!

Kyle_Rourke
Userlevel 1

Please tell me more about the alerts.

J

This is awesome!

P

🙏🙏🙏🙏


I’ve been waiting for this day since we started using Looker 😃


🥳🥳🥳🥳

izzy
Rank
Userlevel 7
Badge +1

We’re working on getting our docs for Alerts up (they’re in review right now), we’ll post more about them once that lands!

anakarina.lance
Rank

Here is the documentation on alerts! As always, if you have any specific questions on the feature or the content please head over to the Looker Help Center to address those questions.

Kyle_Rourke
Userlevel 1

Thank you Anakarina

Kyle_Rourke
Userlevel 1

BTW - I played around with Boards on next.looker and they are very helpful. Good first step in helping your customers curate content. Looker is awesome but the sheer volume of looks and dashboards that get created is overwhelming.

alenseb

woohooo IDE folders!

Been waiting for them 🤩

George_Tempel

Is there any expected downtime for this deployment?

Kyle_Webb
Userlevel 2

I don’t usually get too excited about releases but this one sounds awesome.

Alerts is a game changer!! This is one feature we were disappointed Looker didn’t have when we first joined, but we didn’t expect it to be introduced so soon. Our users will love this.


Folders will make a huge difference as well!!


And the Table beta visual keeps getting better with every release 👌…keep churning out those enhancements!!

B
Userlevel 5
Badge

There’s something even more major than the actual features themselves that I’m noticing, and that’s the ability to drag things (such as IDE files and the content on Curated Content) without needing a context menu. That’s really awesome to see, and I hope the design language across the system continues to move in that direction (being able to right-click on files rather than hitting the three dots, for example). This is a great little usability detail, as Looker’s UI is really where I feel there’s a great deal of opportunity for improvement - the coding experience is so nice and rich at this point.


A couple of little details I’ve noticed so far:

-You can drag and drop Dashboards within a Board’s section, but you can’t drag-and-drop to cross sections

-I encountered a “Validator cannot run” (or something like that) at a certain point. If I can recreate the conditions I’ll comment on them here

anakarina.lance
Rank

Hi there! Deployments to hosted customers will be during the instance’s scheduled maintenance window - available here. There will be some temporary downtime sometime within this window. Please reach out via the Looker Help Center with any further questions on this matter.

Dawid
Userlevel 6
Badge +1

Contributors can add context with links and descriptions to help guide colleagues.



Where can we add links and descriptions on a board?

Dawid
A
Userlevel 3

Hello,


I’ve just started playing around the new version and the new features are really great 😉 Thanks for improving Looker so often and quickly (any release is like Christmas day where you discover your gifts 😉


Talking about the alerting feature, I found something weird.

I have a basic Google Analytics conversion rate measure plotted by hour in the graph below but when clicking on “Alerting” the system detects like 24 measures (basically 1 per hour)… I would expect to see just one measure and then be able to select “change by x %” as the example shown in the release note.


image


Is there something I’m doing wrong?


Thanks,

Anthony

B
Userlevel 5
Badge

antho - I was a bit confused by this at first. Because you’ve pivoted, Looker allows you to put an alert on any of the pivoted values (using the ‘Any’ one on the top) or on a specific one (and those are the numbers you’re seeing). I haven’t yet figured out the details of the variance calculation yet either, I wonder if they chose not to release that side of it in the last minute.

anakarina.lance
Rank

@Dawid_Nawrot @antho @bens


Thank you for all your great questions. Please note that comments on this thread are not formally tracked. For help requests and issue reports please open a separate conversation or reach out via the Looker Help Center! Our lovely support team is more than happy to address any comments, questions or concerns you may be facing.

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