how to learn looker data visualization.

*this is a guide that was from lecture videos and is used to help you gain an understanding of how to learn looker data visualization.

What is Looker BI

Looker is a tool that allows you to look at your company’s data in a centralized location to provide to business users.

Looker considers themselves a complete platform and they do not integrate with many database systems or business intelligence software.

Looker is a great option for smaller companies to have all your data in a single location.

Looker works by creating models using LookML, or Look Modeling Language.

You connect your RDBMS (MySQL, SQL Server) to LookML which will define all the metrics and dimensions from your RDBMS and once the data is within LookML you can analyze through Looker Explore/Explorer to see different views and segments of the data.

There are three different use cases when using Looker Explore: Users, Apps and Deliver.
Users can login and create their own views of the data. Apps allows you to integrate other software such as Slack, and you can then be within Slack to search within Looker to use for Slack. Deliver allows you to email reports, dashboards or tables. You can also publish Looker data to Amazon S3 or Google BigQuery.

You can connect other data sources by using a software called Presto, which is a distributed query engine. You can combine data and use in a single query with Presto.

Go to Orbitera for a free trial using Looker
-> Create account -> Sign In -> Log In to Looker

Explore Data in Looker BI

Log in to Looker -> Explore data -> Explore: Orders Items and Users -> on the left column are the tables in Explore -> SQL commands are created automatically as you add new data fields into the table/view

Dimension fields can be thought of as the context, and Measure fields can be seen as the subject.

LookML
What Looker does is have automatically generated SQL queries that are created based on a data model called LookML, which is the modeling language. Once you connect to a SQL database then the LookML will be automatically generated.

You can then look into LookML to ensure the SQL is accurate and correct.

Go to Looker to learn more about LookML

Create Expressions
To see the SQL query for a specific data field hover over the data field and click ‘go to LookML’ -> add field to table -> go into Explore and select Calculations -> create the calculated field

You can then filter the table using Filters -> Enter query and then click Run.

Visualize Data in Looker BI

Add the fields you want into the table, remove what fields you don’t need -> Click Visualization -> change the chart to your need -> you can save the visualization as a Look -> you can adjust the visualization by clicking Edit under the Visualization tab

Build dashboards
You can then add all of your saved Looks that you created and add them into a dashboard. When you are in one of your saved Looks, click the gear icon and select Add to Dashboard. Once you have added the Looks into the dashboard, you can then arrange by selecting Edit in the dashboard.

Schedule data deliveries and alerting
Once you create your dashboard, click on the gear icon and select Schedule.