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Looker 6.18 Release Notes

anakarina.lance
Rank

Anticipated Deployment Dates


Release Rollout Begins: August 11, 2019

Release Final & Download Available: August 22, 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.





System Configuration Notices


Self-hosted customers should take note of items marked with a 🛠 as they indicate changes to system configurations that may impact your ability to run the new release.





Beta and Experimental Labs Features


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





Notable Features


Internal Help Resources


Admins will now have the ability to use a markdown file to configure a list of Looker help resources that are available at their company. Once configured, users will be able to access that list for the Help dropdown menu in the platform. Learn more.


25%20PM


Features by Section


Dashboards, Visualizations, and Explore




  • ⚗ Table-Next Improvements (Labs Beta).

    • Ability to control global text formatting. For example, row font size, header font size, header text color, header background color, and header alignment. Learn more.

    • Ability to display visualizations within the cells of a table. Learn more.




  • ⚗ Alerts Improvements (Labs Beta).

    • Ability to give an alert a custom title. Learn more.

    • Ability to use table calculations when creating an alert.

    • Ability to subscribe to another user’s alert. Note the alert must be Public and the user must have the follow_alerts permission. Learn more.




Platform and Administration




  • 🛠 Dependencies JAR. Certain Java class files are now distributed separately; resulting in two distinct JAR files that will need to be downloaded and installed to update your Looker instances. Learn more.


  • ⚡ Completely removed the “Legacy Rendering” Legacy Feature.


  • Embed events.

    • Added look:ready and explore:ready events to indicate when both the explore and query have loaded. Learn more.

    • Added a status result to dashboard embed events to indicate whether a tile produces an error.




  • ⚗ Content curation Improvements (Labs beta).

    • Ability to view, scroll and sort all boards within a user’s organization.

    • User personal folders now appear both in the Browse menu and on the left sidebar.

    • Folders previously set as a ‘default folder’ will continue to appear in the left sidebar.

    • Developers can set LookML dashboards to appear in the Browse menu and left sidebar.




LookML and Development




  • ⚗ Importing remote projects is no longer in Labs.

    • The generalized “Project Import” feature is no longer in Labs.

    • Importing locally maintained projects is still in Labs under “Local Project Import”.




Dialects




  • Snowflake: Added support for External Table database objects to be scanned for database metadata information. This will surface external tables in SQL Runner and in LookML View generation.


  • ⚡ Aster Data. Partially deprecated Aster Data. It will no longer be selectable as a dialect in the Dialect dropdown in the Connection panel. Existing Aster Data connections will continue to work.


  • ⚡ Microsoft SQL Server 2005. Removed support for MS SQL 2005.


  • ⚡ XtremeData. Removed support for XtremeData.


  • ⚡ Qubole Presto and Qubole Quantum. Upgraded the JDBC driver to version 2.0.2 to fix intermittent NullPointerException errors. Learn more.


  • ⚡ Oracle and Oracle ADWC. Upgraded the Oracle JDBC Thin Driver to version 18.3.


  • ⚡ Only Oracle ADWC. Changed JDBC connection string format for Oracle ADWC connections to use the TNS alias as the hostname. In addition, the TNS_ADMIN JDBC parameter is used to connect with Oracle Wallets.

    • Example:

      jdbc:oracle:thin:@dbname_high?TNS_ADMIN=/path/to/wallet/directory




  • Druid. Updated the JDBC driver to version 1.15.0.


General Tweaks and Bug Fixes


Security



  • Fixed an issue where a Look or dashboard tile’s default filter values could be applied instead of a send or schedule’s filter values. This could only occur if the filter values came from a view that has v_ as the first two characters in its name.

  • Fixed an issue that resulted in User Attribute values set to hidden were printed to server logs.


Scheduling and Downloads



  • All formatting types in streamed results were being ignored. Formats will now be respected. Note: JSON detail format will continue to ignore formats as it is its expected behavior.

  • Fixed a scheduler issue that prevented users from running a specific look both when in development mode and when that user did not have development permission to the model the content was based on.

  • Fixed an issue where schedules failed when a user was in development mode and did not have developer access to the model, even if data should return outside of development mode.

  • Fixed an issue where the schedule dispatcher would not run on the master node if it had scheduler threads set to zero, even if other nodes had scheduler threads.

  • Fixed an issue where Looker was starting with a default of three unlimited execute scheduler threads even though this should be one.

  • Looker now retries schedules and actions if one fails due to multiple events firing simultaneously.


Platform and Administration



  • Added clarifying text to the Sessions admin panel. No behaviors changed.


Dialects




  • Google Cloud Spanner. Fixed an issue where the JDBC driver hit a Java instantiation exception.


  • Netezza. SQL Runner will now populate database objects from INFORMATION_SCHEMA.VIEWS in addition to INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES in the Schema and Tables sidebar.


  • Snowflake. Fixed an issue where the SQL Runner Describe command did not scope Snowflake tables to the schema, causing describe to fail for tables outside of the default schema.


Embedded Analytics



  • Fixed an issue where updating a Look filter via an iFrame message failed with an error response.

  • Fixed an issue where failed schedules mentioned Looker despite settings being set to not reference Looker.

  • Fixed an issue where the whitelabel favicon was displaying the Looker icon when downloading a PNG in the browser.

  • Numeric filters can now be set on Looks via the embed messaging in an iframe.

  • Fixed an issue where clicking “Explore from Here” when editing an embedded dashboard did not open in a new tab.

12 replies

nolan-ga
Userlevel 1

Really excited about the new table options: formatting, font size, and especially visualization! I was disappointed, though, to see that the bars are not zero-indexed, so you end up with some pretty deceptive truncated bars like this:

image


The relationship between 250 and 420 is not even close to correct because the minimum data point is ~200 and apparently that’s where the origin is. Am I missing an option to “pin to zero”?

image

anakarina.lance
Rank

Thank you so much for your feedback! In order for this feedback to be tracked by our Product team, I’ve opened a thread with our customer support team and they can further address your specific questions. They’ll be in touch soon!

A

Hi there!


Regarding the Help Page for Internal Resources, where does an Admin enable this? Is that going to be in Labs?


And where do the users navigate to get to the this Help list? Is that in the upper right hand corner or somewhere else?

marieb
Rank

Hi @AlexG! The documentation is here: https://docs.looker.com/admin-options/settings/internal-help


It’s a regular feature, not in Labs!

menashe
Userlevel 3

Seemingly another change with this version (or maybe it’s in a previous version and I merely never noticed it until now) is that SQL Runner queries are allowed to run more than an hour without being killed by Looker. In previous versions, Looker killed any such query after an running for an hour.

Dawid
Userlevel 7
Badge +1

image


This was a nice surprise on one of my graphs. Wee bar charts in table-next visualisation! Thanks!

Dawid
svickers
Userlevel 2

New embed events is listed in the summary here but no details about it, is there anywhere we can see what was added?

anakarina.lance
Rank

@svickers The new embed events are listed under Platform and Administration if you click on the hyperlink in the summary it will take you to that section of the notes.

J

In the new Content Curation view (Boards), are there plans to pin LookML dashboards besides regular dashboards and looks?

anakarina.lance
Rank

@joao.clemencio

Thank you for this beta feature feedback! In order for this feedback to be properly tracked by our Product team, I’ve opened a thread for you with our customer support team. They’ll be in touch soon!

UnsignedFoo

Hello! Thank you very much for all the effort!

Our company wants to know what’s the status and roadmap for Alerts, because we want to use it for several cases, but right now we only can use it for a single tile and cannot use it with filters.


Thank you very much!

izzy
Userlevel 7
Badge +1

Just chatted with our Product team and we’re currently iterating based on customer feedback (like this!). Specifically, filters are going to be coming down the pipeline very soon!

Reply


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