Person: Looker is a business intelligence, or BI software, and big data analytics platform that helps business users to explore, analyze and share real-time data analytics easily. As a browser based software as a service platform, Looker connects directly to SQL databases. For example, you could connect Looker to other software as a service applications, such as Salesforce, Mailchimp and Zendesk, heavy read-write operations and transactional databases such as Oracle, IBM Db2 and Microsoft SQL server, business-planning tools such as SAP, Net Suite and Oracle, and web analytics products such as Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics. These are just a few examples. Looker is multicloud and supports over 65 database dialects. One major benefit of Looker is its agile modeling layer, which can save data teams and business analysts time that would otherwise be spent manually writing and editing SQL queries. Looker's agile modeling layer allows developers to define through Looker modeling language, or LookML, how the database is structured, and how the tables and columns relate to each other. A useful way to think about LookML is that it's an abstraction layer for SQL that developers use to tell Looker what data to use from the connected database, and how it should interpret that data. As users explore and analyze the data, Looker uses the defined LookML models to automatically generated SQL select queries to send to the database and return the appropriate results. Another benefit of Looker is data governance, which means you can define a single source of truth for data that everyone in the organization can understand and trust. In Looker, you can enforce various types of data security and governance through the Looker user interface, such as assigning specific user roles, as well as through LookML, such as providing access to specific fields or rows of data. To help organizations disseminate data, Looker can surface and expose query results in several ways. First is through the Web interface. This can be in the form of explorers, which are report builder interfaces, looks, which are standalone reports or visualizations, and dashboards, which can contain multiple visualizations. Another way is through scheduled data deliveries, such as sending looks and dashboards to specific e-mail addresses or cloud storage buckets on a one-time or recurring basis. Explorers, dashboards and looks can also be embedded within other websites or applications. Last, Looker provides a REST API that allows you to retrieve, analyze, and transform data and metadata directly from the Looker platform. Looker's unique architecture provides a rich development framework that is built to support enterprise-grade workflows and help your users and tools access the most accurate and up-to-date version of your organization's data. With this unified view into your organization's data, you, as a LookML developer, can curate data experiences to ensure that both people and systems get the data they need how and when they need it.
