I'm a huge fan of Looker, but I'm not sure how I feel about this news. The best parts of Looker:
- It connects directly to your existing data warehouse. Most BI tools suck in your data into their datastore; Looker queries your database directly. If you wanted Looker to cache results for performance reasons, you could set up a dedicated schema in Redshift for example and only give write privileges to that one schema. But even the cached dataset was stored directly in your data warehouse.
- It is platform agnostic.
- LookML is backed by Git. By default, changes to your LookML definitions are pushed to a Looker-owned Github repo, but you can change this so that the repo is under your control as well.
- The support is pretty phenomenal.
There's that unsettled part in me that's wondering the over/under on two years before we get the next announcement: to give you better performance, it's tightly integrated with BigQuery; LookML is getting long in the tooth so we've gone ahead and created the views you'll need which are now accessible via the Google Analytics interface; you can go ahead and forward your concerns to /dev/null.
As a looker customer seeing this news makes me very uneasy. We have invested a ton in their platform by building three of our core products on their embedded version. The thought that our future relies now more in Google's product decisions is scary.
> The thought that our future relies now more in Google's product decisions is scary.
At least in this case, Google's product decisions are counter-balanced by the variety of enterprise contracts Looker is already beholden to. Which should help to temper any abrupt surprises.
That said Azure has embedded PowerBI[1], AWS has embedded Quicksight[2], and Tableau even offers an embedded analytics service[3]. So you're far more likely to see it being rolled into GCP than being killed off outright. And all of their competitors offer the same flavor of "deeply integrated with our ecosystem but also connects to just about data store". So they'd actually lose feature parity with all of their main competitors if they butchered the embedded version.
Any business decision-maker who decides to take a critical dependency on a VC-funded startup has only themselves to blame when they are inevitably left high and dry. The only real customers of a startup are the investors.
I really, really doubt it; Google has never killed a product that it created or acquired to serve as a complement to enterprise Ads/Analytics usage.
Google kills plenty of its consumer products if they don’t catch on in a big way (Reader, Google+); and it certainly “transitions” developer-targeted product/service startups into plain features (Firebase, WordLens, etc.) But this is neither—it’s BI software, for enterprise customers who build it deeply into their decision-making in the same way they build Google Analytics itself into their decision-making. These are not the people even Google wants to make mad. They’re precisely the people writing the checks which make up the majority of Google’s ad revenue!
> and it certainly “transitions” developer-targeted product/service startups into plain features (Firebase, WordLens, etc.
They recently killed "Works with Nest" in favour of an Assistant-backed API that doesn't currently implement what Google acknowledges to be the most popular features of "Works with Nest".
Google are more than willing to kill developer-oriented as consumer-oriented.
Thats definitely the wrong read. This is a direct competitor to Microsoft's PowerBI. Google will need Looker to get large enterprise data management deals on Google Cloud.
Periscope features for non-SQL users not strong enough. Looker did a great job of enabling the non-SQL analyst types more familiar with a Tableau like UI.
- It connects directly to your existing data warehouse. Most BI tools suck in your data into their datastore; Looker queries your database directly. If you wanted Looker to cache results for performance reasons, you could set up a dedicated schema in Redshift for example and only give write privileges to that one schema. But even the cached dataset was stored directly in your data warehouse.
- It is platform agnostic.
- LookML is backed by Git. By default, changes to your LookML definitions are pushed to a Looker-owned Github repo, but you can change this so that the repo is under your control as well.
- The support is pretty phenomenal.
There's that unsettled part in me that's wondering the over/under on two years before we get the next announcement: to give you better performance, it's tightly integrated with BigQuery; LookML is getting long in the tooth so we've gone ahead and created the views you'll need which are now accessible via the Google Analytics interface; you can go ahead and forward your concerns to /dev/null.