At Looker’s annual data conference, JOIN , the company announced Looker 5, its next generation data platform. Looker 5 delivers new levels of power and functionality, including three new types of Looker Blocks that deliver custom visualizations, dedicated tools for complex analyses, and pre- modeled external data sources. It also features Looker’s new Action Hub and a library of 3rd party actions.
Also announced at JOIN were Applications by Looker — individual products purpose-built for specific use cases like Marketing Analytics and IT/Ops Analytics. Finally, Looker’s flagship BI tool gains powerful features like Data Merge, dozens of new statistical functions, and huge improvements to its SQL runner as of Looker 5.
We believe that the notion of just using a pure BI tool is antiquated, limiting and inefficient,” said Frank Bien, CEO of Looker. “Forward-thinking data-driven companies want a complete data platform to help operationalize their business using data. Looker 4 made that possible; Looker 5 makes it easy. It is our most complete and flexible platform – a comprehensive, secure and integrated data stack that is agile and expandable. It is the platform upon which to build the next-generation of business applications.”
LOOKER 5
Looker 5 makes the power of the platform markedly more accessible. Looker’s most tech-enabled developers are already building amazing tools and applications on the platform, but not every organization has deep development resources. Looker 5 smooths that path so that everyone can benefit from new Blocks, tools and applications to build exactly what they need.
Action Hub – The newly added Action Hub makes it easier than ever to take action on insights directly from within Looker. Integrations and actions in the Hub allow users to quickly and securely make work more efficient. From right within the same tool that gives you data access and analysis, you can now change the status on support tickets in Zendesk, send data and dashboards to Google Drive or Box, or pause an underperforming Adwords campaign, among many other Actions.
New Looker Blocks – Looker 5 makes building on the data platform easier than ever before. New Looker Block types include Viz Blocks providing a library of custom visualizations, Data Tools that create curated experiences for end-users (e.g. a Google Analytics-like Web Analytics tool), and Data Blocks that let customers join in pre-modeled external data sets like weather data or demographic data to enrich their own data.
Applications – Applications by Looker are powerful new end-to-end solutions for users to dig into vertical-specific data. Built on the Looker Data Platform, they leverage all Looker’s capabilities to access, analyze and take action with data. The first three offerings will be Marketing Analytics by Looker, IT Operations Analytics by Looker and Event Analytics by Looker. These department-specific solutions give people the data and analysis they need, as well as the ability to take real action, all in a simple interface and built on the same platform as Looker’s best-in-class BI tool.
Additional Features in Looker 5
- Data Merge: Intuitively merge results from two or more disparate datasets, even if that data lives in different databases. This will help customers examine time-series data, geographic data, and other summary data from multiple sources in a single interface.
- Druid Support: Looker now supports Druid, the high-performance, column-oriented, distributed data store. Quickly ingest massive quantities of event data in Druid and use Looker to run low-latency queries on top of the data.
- Statistical Functions: Over 50 new functions that support statistical procedures have been added Looker’s extensive library of functions and operators. These new functions enable Looker users to run statistical tests, compare distributions with their data and reshape their data as needed.
- SQL Runner Visualizations: Looker’s SQL Runner has gained significant new functionality to better enable Looker’s most technical users. Analysts can now search, sort, save, and visualize their data directly in Looker’s SQL Runner.
Looker 5 will be available in October 2017.
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