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The Kitchen Table

Explore the product knowledge we've built up together

2115 Topics

sam
Looker Staff
samLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

How to access a project deploy key after Github setup has finishedKnowledge Drop

Last Tested: March 7, 2021  You can get to this on the command line, if you host your own Looker instance. As of 4.8+, the public and private key live at:~/looker/deploy_keys/<project_name>/id_rsa.pub~/looker/deploy_keys/<project_name>/id_rsaAs of 4.18+, you can also get the project public key via a Looker API endpoint.In the UI, if you reset the connection and use the same repo name, then the same deploy key is used, so you can also access it there.Note: If your instance is clustered, then it'll be in the ~/lookershare/ directory This content is subject to limited support.                  

1340
sam
Looker Staff
1 year ago
ryan.dunlavy
Looker Staff
ryan.dunlavyLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

What is SMTP (for Looker)?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Jul 1, 2019 Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is the universal standard protocol for communication via email. When sending an email from your Looker Google account, you use SMTP. All emails coming from Looker to outside email addresses also use SMTP.In Looker, you can either use custom SMTP settings so that all email messages come from an account you control, or you can use the default SMTP settings to take advantage of Looker’s email service, without the need for additional configuration. So that, all emails will come from noreply@lookermail.com.Custom SMTP is set up in the Admin > SMTP panel. This content is subject to limited support.                  

1340
ryan.dunlavy
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
Department of Customer LoveLooker Staff
published in Blog Archives

Optimizing BigQuery + GCP with Looker Blocks® from Datatonic

This content, written by Andrew Powell, was initially posted in Looker Blog on Nov 14, 2017. The content is subject to limited support.Google BigQuery is an extremely powerful analytics data warehouse. It allows you to run terabyte-scale queries, getting results in seconds, and gives you the benefits of being a completely fully managed solution. BigQuery and other Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services offers “pay as you go” pricing. Whilst this leads to greater flexibility and can keep costs low relative to other providers, it also means keeping track of all of your costs across your business can get a bit tricky. To help simplify this, we’ve taken logs and billing data from GCP, and surfaced analysis through Looker to give everyone a detailed view of your usage and associated costs. GCP and BigQuery monitoring offers a managed service to track cost and usage of BigQuery across your entire GCP environment. With Stackdriver Logging, you can export these logs to BigQuery for more detaile

1340
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
11 months ago
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
Department of Customer LoveLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Duplicate Views in Field Picker Using View_LabelKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Oct 21, 2020 Looker has an article about cool ways to use Liquid when labeling, but if you use Liquid in a view_label in one location, say for a field, but use a static string for view_label in another location, like the explore, you will see duplicate view labels in the field picker. ex: Liquid with view_label in view: Static view_label in explore:Result in Field Picker:​WHAT IS HAPPENINGThe line breaks that help make the Liquid easier to read actually add spaces into the view_label, effectively making the labels different. ex: From explore: "My Awesome Name" From view: "My Awesome Name " To resolve this, remove any spaces/characters between each the liquid tags where you are defining the view name that you are trying to match. ex: ​THE RESULTYour field picker only has one view label for your custom name! ​Note: I left spaces between the {% else %} and Gobbleydegook because I wasn't trying to match another view_label defined else where. If you have other Liquid conditions

1340
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
1 year ago
A
Looker Staff
adina.katzLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Can you use sql_trigger_value in a PDT that has liquid in it?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Jan 16, 2019 No.You can use persist_for in order to persist the PDT or create different views for your different liquid conditions and use sql_trigger_value in those PDTs (basically, remove the liquid). This content is subject to limited support.                   

1340
A
Looker Staff
1 year ago
sarah.tayeri
Looker Staff
sarah.tayeriLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Internal DB PerformanceKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Jan 24, 2021 When we use system activity in Looker, we’re directly querying the tables stored in the internal database. Because Looker is constantly reading from and writing to the internal database, if we allowed users to query the tables without restriction on top of this, performance issues would certainly ensue. That’s why we limit the number of concurrent queries to 1 for the internal db; that is, we only allow one System Activity query to run at a time. If you try to run concurrent queries, additional queries will be queued until the first completes.Another way we attempt to keep from overloading the internal db is by only updating and caching the data in System Activity dashboards every 12 hours.Instances that use Elite System Activity use more robust methods of improving internal DB performance, and because of this, the 1 query concurrency limit and 12 hour caching policy for SA dashboards aren’t imposed. This content is subject to limited support.                 

1340
sarah.tayeri
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
Department of Customer LoveLooker Staff
published in Blog Archives

Data of Thrones part I: death count & screen time inGame of Thrones

This content, written by Kelly Payne, was initially posted in Looker Blog on Jun 21, 2017. The content is subject to limited support.Looker is home to many Game of Thrones (GoT) nerds, and recently we got our hands on some datasets describing the TV show and books. This is Part I of III posts where we will dive into these datasets and share what we learned from the numbers on our favorite show — Game of Thrones. There are a fair few resources on George R R Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice book series, which the show is based on (more on that later), but datasets on the TV show were much harder to find. In the end, we landed on two: a dataset on screen time from and deaths in Game of Thrones by . With some from our analysts, we were able to join the two datasets together, as well as add some extra background from the books fact table. While there were a few limitations with this method, the data mapped surprisingly well between the book series and the TV series to create some awesome G

1330
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
11 months ago
Christel_Ilaka
Looker Staff
Christel_IlakaLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

How to search by Name from another view then filter by ID without joining both viewsKnowledge Drop

Last tested: May 2, 2020 The ProblemLet say that we have two views: Rental and Customer . The Rental view has more than 1.5 billion records and each record has a customer_id . The Customer view has more than 200k records with the following columns: customer_id , first_name , and last_name .Now we want to be able to filter the data in the Rental view by entering the name of the customer in the filter suggestion; however, we know that the customer's name is stored in the Customer view and we don't want to join these two views because of the number of records that we have in both views.A SolutionThis problem can be solve by using Liquid variables and the parameter parameter.In the Customer view, concatenate the ID, first name, and last name to create a new dimension:dimension: full_name_and_id {type: stringsql: ${customer_id} || '-' || ${first_name} || '-' || ${last_name} ;;} In the Rental view, create a filter-only field using parameter:parameter: namesearch {type: stringsuggest_explore:

1330
Christel_Ilaka
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
Department of Customer LoveLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

How do I use extends with dimension groups?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Jul 29, 2019 In general, extends will bring through all of the base view field's parameters for a field with the same name in the extending view. However, dimension groups are unique in that they generate field names that are different from the actual name of the dimension group (a dimension group called "created" will generate "created_time", "created_date", etc.). Therefore, if you want to override the timeframes parameter in the dimension group of an extending view, you'll need to re-specify type: time in the extending dimension group, even if it's already specified in the base dimension group, because type: time is what actually tells dimension groups to generate these field names. Example: This will not override the timeframes in the created dimension_group in test1.view: test2 {extends: [test1]dimension_group: created {timeframes: [month, year]}} This WILL override the timeframes in the created dimension_group in test1:view: test2 {extends: [test1]dimension_group: cr

1330
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
1 year ago
V
Looker Staff
vitor.leepkalnLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

How to find out the remote URL of the repository connected to a Looker projectKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Sep 3, 2019 Those with multiple projects could be using different repositories, and it's hard to troubleshoot when we don't know where the remote is hosted.Check in Looker Go to "Project Settings" and scroll to the bottom of the page - here you will see the Remote Origin URL:Check in Looker serverIf you have access to the Looker server, navigate to the project directory inside of the models directory /looker/models/project_x and run the following code:git config --get remote.origin.url The following info will be displayed:lookeruser@instance:~/looker/models/project$ git config --get remote.origin.urlgit@github.com::org/repo.gitshowing the repo. This content is subject to limited support.                  

1330
V
Looker Staff
1 year ago
molly.lippsett
Looker Staff
molly.lippsettLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Troubleshooting SSO by the embed URL - First StepsKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Oct 3, 2018 This is a paraphrase of this Community article - go there for more infoUse a URL Decoder to decode the embed url and then check these things first when troubleshooting SSO by the embed URL:Does the embedded object exist on the “production” version of your instance? If it doesn't, you may see a "Model Not Found" error   Do the embed users have the correct permissions? If not, you may see a 404   Are all URL parameters are correctly formed? Troubleshooting descriptions of the parameters are in this article Doc on url parameters here Use the Embed URI Validator in the Admin panel   Confirm that everything is spelled correctly This content is subject to limited support.                  

1320
molly.lippsett
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
Department of Customer LoveLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

How can I get an entire dashboard to scroll horizontally instead of vertically?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Jun 1, 2020 Because user-defined dashboard are always created using the newspaper layout, there is a limit to how many elements you can fit horizontally. Therefore, the trick is to use layout: static for the LookML dashboard so that you can define the dashboard width and element width yourself: https://docs.looker.com/reference/dashboard-reference#layoutExample:- dashboard: test_wide_2title: Test Wide 2layout: staticwidth: 5000tile_size: 100elements:- name: hello_worldtype: textheight: 2width: 10top: 0left: 0title_text: "very wide"- name: hello_world2type: textheight: 2width: 10top: 0left: 10title_text: "very wide2"- name: hello_world3type: textheight: 2width: 10top: 0left: 20title_text: "very wide3" This content is subject to limited support.                   

1310
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
Department of Customer LoveLooker Staff
published in Blog Archives

Fun with data - hacking Hacker News

This content, written by Lloyd Tabb, was initially posted in Looker Blog on Mar 29, 2016. The content is subject to limited support.Hacking Hacker News Last year, Google's uploaded complete data about Hacker News' posts to Google's BigQuery data engine. BigQuery is a giant clustered SQL engine in the cloud that can query enormous amounts of data very quickly. Felipe did some great of the dataset writing SQL by hand and graphing in Matlab. Others on Hacker News picked up the thread and added their own analyses on (meta, right?). I loved the idea of exploring this public dataset and wanted to surface some new insights, and also to make it accessible to anyone who wanted to play with the data, whether or not they knew SQL. So I wrote up a quick model in LookML (Looker's YAML-based modeling language) to describe how the BigQuery tables relate to each other. (It's all of four files and fewer than 300 lines of code; ). Below, I'll walk through the process of building out the model and the

1310
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
11 months ago
sam
Looker Staff
samLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

How to replicate the link param dropdown menu with a html tag?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: March 2021 Generally speaking, a html tag can only provide a single link.However, we have a neat community topic that takes advantage of the html tag <details> in order to create something similar to a link dropdown! This content is subject to limited support.                 

1310
sam
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
Department of Customer LoveLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

How to unlink OAuth from the Google Drive action in Action HubKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Apr 8, 2020 ScenarioI've hooked my Google Drive to Looker via OAuth as documented here to be able to send data (explores, looks, dashboards, etc.) directly to my google drive., but how do I unlink it if I want to send to another account?tl;drOn Google-side go to https://myaccount.google.com/permissions In the Third-party apps with account access section hit "Remove" for the Looker App integration Within Looker we should be prompted to login again via Action and our prior OAuth account is unlinkedConceptTypically with Action Hub integrations, we can enable the feature within Looker, but won't have the ability to update integration accounts or anything authentication related since Looker doesn't keep those credentials. Often times to unlink Action Hub integrations, we'll need to go on the 3rd party application-side and find integrated apps to unlink rather than within Looker. This content is subject to limited support.                  

1310
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
1 year ago
jamesnestler
Looker Staff
jamesnestlerLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

What happens under the hood when you hit "reset connection" in Project Settings?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Apr 7, 2020 When a user hits 'Reset Connection’ in Project Settings, Looker executes a function called revert_repo() calling two jgit commands, reset and clean:resetCommandBy default, reset simply changes the `HEAD` the current branch is pointing at. The `HEAD` reference is found with a call that returns the reference id of the most recent commit to master.When Looker performs the reset, it uses the parameter `--HARD` to reset both the HEAD and the index of the current working directory. You will recall that the index defines where different commits are on the git tree. Therefore, this reset --HARD essentially updates all references in the git tree, ensuring the map is accurateSource: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Reset-DemystifiedcleanClean removes all untracked files. In the context of git reset, this means that after the tree has been updated, all files not appearing on the tree will be removed.Why does this `magically` solve git problems?If resetting the con

1310
jamesnestler
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Michael
MichaelMember
published in DCL Mic Drops

New DCL Mic Drop: Annie HeMic Drop

DCL Mic Drop #4 The Department of Customer Love (DCL) is Looker’s all-knowing support team. Yes, they're actually called that. They’re kind of the brains behind this whole operation! You may have talked to them via support chat or on a ticket, or maybe even in the Looker Community. Besides being true Looker savants and genuinely interesting characters, DCLers deeply understand our users’ experiences and challenges because they’re in the code with our users every day, helping work through it.  We’re super excited that now each month, we’ll publish a new Mic Drop to give you a glimpse behind the curtain to meet one of these fabled DCLers. We will learn a little more about the individual behind the chat magic, as well as leverage their expertise as they select 3-5 Knowledge Drops that you should definitely check out! This month, we are lucky enough to have chatted with @Annie_He! Looker Name: Icebreaker Looker Michael: Annie! Hello - so glad to get the chance to speak with you! I feel lik

1310
Michael
1 year ago
sam
Looker Staff
samLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Can I force users to log out when they close the browser?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Oct 2019  Yes! You can disable "Persistent Sessions" under Admin > Authentication > Sessions.This forces users to log out on browser close, and it also gets rid of the "remember me" box. cite Docs. This content is subject to limited support.                

1300
sam
Looker Staff
1 year ago
maxcorbin
Looker Staff
maxcorbinLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

How do I soft-delete content from the API?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Oct 7, 2019 You can soft-delete a look using the update_look() API to change the look's deleted property to true. In the Ruby SDK, this looks like this:update_look(lookid, {deleted: true})You can soft-delete a dashboard the same way, using update_dashboard().Soft-deleted content can be undeleted by updating deleted to false.Soft-delete means that it the row still resides in the Looker db, but (as of Looker 6.16) is excluded from all_looks and search_looks unless you specifically ask for deleted=true.​ This content is subject to limited support.                   

1300
maxcorbin
Looker Staff
1 year ago
sam
Looker Staff
samLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Can you set datagroups to clear cache at a certain time of day?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: March 2021Yes! Since datagroups use SQL triggers, you can use the exact same queries as in our docs on `sql_trigger_value`.In particular, you can use `SELECT FLOOR((UNIX_TIMESTAMP(NOW()) - 60*60*3)/(60*60*24))`, where "3" is the UTC hour of day you'd like to clear cache. This content is subject to limited support.                

1300
sam
Looker Staff
1 year ago
V
Looker Staff
vishal.dharmadhikariLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Is it possible to turn on SAML but prevent Looker from creating users for a specific group/set of users even if they already have an account within the IDP?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Aug 26, 2020 Yes!This can be accomplished using the SP Entity/IdP Audience (documentation) setting in the Admin > SAML settings. You can assign this field to only specific people within the IdP to be allowed to log in to Looker. If a user attempts to log in that does not have this value assigned, the authentication with fail and the user will not be able to access Looker. This will also prevent them from creating an account until they are assigned this value and can successfully authentication.Usually this is done through groups on the IdP side but different providers have different terminology. The Audience field is how they specify the group name in the Looker settings. This content is subject to limited support.                  

1300
V
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
Department of Customer LoveLooker Staff
published in Blog Archives

The Redshift - SORTKEY and DISTKEY

This content, written by Lloyd Tabb, was initially posted in Looker Blog on Dec 4, 2013. The content is subject to limited support.Indexing in MPP analytical databases (Redshift, Vertica, Greenplum...) works very differently than in traditional transactional databases. Suppose I’m looking to count nursing jobs. I’ve got a list of all job postings in Santa Cruz, and they aren’t ordered in any reasonable way. So I start at the first one, read it, and scan down the list looking for the word “nurse.” It takes a couple of seconds—no problem. Suppose I go regional and I’m looking at the San Francisco Bay Area. That’s 20 times the number of Santa Cruz job postings, and it takes me a few minutes to scan the list and make a count. If I wanted to look at all of California, maybe it would take me an hour. The entire United States—even longer. Now, suppose I want to analyze and compare all of these job postings across the entire United States. I need to scan these lists many times quickly. It’s to

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Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
11 months ago
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
Department of Customer LoveLooker Staff
published in Blog Archives

Using data to transform the customer experience with Looker and Braze

This content, written by The Looker Team, was initially posted in Looker Blog on Aug 29, 2020. The content is subject to limited support.When real-time data is made available across an organization, everyone becomes empowered to improve the customer experience. With dashboards and visualizations to track consumer and product metrics, teams can gauge how products are performing and build alerts to flag changes in behavior or customer spend. These insights allow consumer-focused teams to better understand their “always on” shopper and create new opportunities for serving information to them in ways that can positively affect their buying decisions. With the ability to use data this way, improving the customer experience can start to include more data-driven activities such as: Connecting with consumers where they want, when they want Collecting customer experience data faster from notifications, email, apps, and websites to inform new decisions and strategies Feeding data back to teams i

1300
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
11 months ago
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
Department of Customer LoveLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Image (PNG/PDF) download says "Query Failed: Must query at least one dimension/measure"Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Aug 21, 2017 Image downloads are based on Production. It's is possible that you are in Development Mode.While in Dev Mode, you may have saved a Look or Explore and then you defined at least one dimension or measure, BUT, you have yet to deploy to production. Therefore, while in Dev Mode and without a deployment to production, your Looks do not yet exist and are not available to download as a PNG/PDF.This is usually fixed with deploying to production and then reattempting the download. This content is subject to limited support.                  

1290
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
1 year ago
maxcorbin
Looker Staff
maxcorbinLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

What is the difference between SSO embed and SSO authentication?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Jul 3, 2018 SSO stands for single sign-on and refers to a wide variety of techniques for avoiding having a user login multiple times.SSO embedding embeds reports into a website from Looker, and SSO authentication allows you to use one account to log in to other services.SSO embedding involves the generation of a URL that authenticates the user as a new or returning Looker user, defining all of the permissions and roles, and then displaying the desired content or data to the end user in an iframe.SSO authentication refers to being able to sign on to multiple services with one login, the way that many services allow you to sign on using your Google or Facebook account. This content is subject to limited support.                   

1290
maxcorbin
Looker Staff
1 year ago

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