I’m keen to see if we can use Looker to generate/distribute report output, but without having to create a LookML model
any suggestions welcome
If you’re comfortable using SQL, you can do this using SQL Runner. You can now build visualizations off SQL runner queries directly, or you could just build a “big wide table” with a SQL query and then create an ad-hoc explore to do your visualization.
This docs page explains a lot more: https://docs.looker.com/data-modeling/learning-lookml/sql-runner-create-queries#creating_an_ad_hoc_e...
I’ll note though that you can’t add these outputs to dashboards/looks— They can be shared via link and sent via email/webhook/all the standard delivery options, but can’t become part of content like looks or dashboards.
thanks @izzymiller that looks good , will try it out.