Person: To understand how you, as a LookML developer, can support business users, it's important to become familiar with the business user experience and how they use the Looker platform on a daily basis to answer data-driven questions. Furthermore, the ability to navigate the Looker platform as a business user will help you to fully test your changes to LookML code by reviewing how results appear when accessed by business users. Let's explore the business user experience by walking through an example Looker instance. when you first log into the Looker platform, your home page may vary depending on what your company's Looker administrator has configured. In this example instance, we will begin on the shared folders page. Folders in Looker are where content lives, just like files in your computer or Google Drive are stored in folders. As you may know, Looker has two primary categories of users, business users and developers. As a LookML developer, you use the develop environment to curate report builder interfaces, called explorers, that are used by business users and to configure other aspects in your Looker instance, such as rules for caching and data security. Business users can click on explorer to see a list of the custom explorers that LookML developers have modeled for them. Within the explorers, they can analyze and visualize data to answer business questions and save their results as visualizations and reports. This example Looker instance has many explorers, including one for order items under the e-commerce trading header, and another for flights under the FAA header. As a business user working at a hypothetical e-commerce company, you can also navigate through the various folders of the Looker instance to find content that has already been built using available explorers, such as the business pulse dashboard. For business users, this example business pulse dashboard provides some high-level key performance indicators that a typical e-commerce company might care about, such as the number of new users acquired and the average order amount. In Looker, these are called single value visualizations. Scrolling down, you can see other visualizations, such as the number of orders by category over time in an area chart. Let's say you want to learn more about new users your company has acquired. You can click on the number provided in the new users acquired tile to drill down to the underlying data. After drilling down on the new users acquired tile, you can view the granular rows of data that constitute the overall number of new users acquired. For example, for this tile, you can see each user's ID, first name, and last name. In Looker, these data attributes are called dimensions. If you want to learn even more about these users, you can click on the explore link. This takes you out of the dashboard and into the explorer, which is the report builder interface that has been curated by a LookML developer. In this example, the overall explorer is called order items, but there are several expandable groups of fields in the field picker found in the left side panel. These are called views. An explorer is composed of one or more views. For example, when you want to analyze order information, you might want to include fields from other related views, such as users. In SQL terms, each view represents a database table and the tables are prejoined in the LookML model file to define the overall explorer, like this order items explorer. Using this explorer, you can ask questions about the newly acquired users. For example, maybe you are curious about the age of each of these users. To see age information about these users, you can expand the user's view and click on the age dimension to add it to your results set. Then, you can click run to view the results. If you want to know how much each of these new users has already spent, you can expand the order items view and click on the total revenue measure, which aggregates all of the purchases for each user. Once again, you need to click run to view the new results. Behind the scenes, Looker has automatically generated an SQL query for the drill down results and is updating it with the new selections. As a LookML developer, you can click on the SQL talk about, typically hidden from business users, to see that Looker is selecting users.id, users.first_name, users.last_name, and users.age, which are the dimensions selected in the explorer. Looker is also executing a sum of order_items.sale_price for total_revenue, which is the measure selected to aggregate the purchase data for each user. You can also see that the data comes from a table called Looker_ecom.order_items with a left join to Looker_ecom.users. Finally, there's a big where condition, that is identifying only the new users from the past 180 days. Rather than writing this SQL query manually, it was so easy for the business user to click on some fields and get this output automatically. This is all because of the agile modeling layer in LookML. A LookML developer or team of developers had already created this order items explorer, specified which views should be in the explorer, specified with dimensions and measures should be in each view, and defined the SQL logic for each dimension and measure. Now, you can save these results a stand-alone report or Look for ongoing reference by clicking the gear icon in the top right and selecting save as a Look. That was a quick demonstration of the significance and value of LookML for empowering business users to explore and analyze data. If you are completely new to Looker, there is a fundamental prerequisite to be aware of regarding the underlying data that is used by business users. A Looker administrator needs to create a connection to a specific database source, such as your company's primary database, in order for LookML developers to access and model that data to curate explorers for business users. Admins can find setup and configuration details in the database configuration details section of Looker's dialects documentation page. As a LookML developer, you can see available database connections in your organization's Looker instance by clicking on the develop tab on the left side navigation panel of the Looker UI, then selecting SQL runner. SQL runner is a console or portal to database that had been connected to your organization's Looker instance. You can see all of the database connection options under connection. Now, after this brief overview of the Looker business user experience, we hope that you are excited to explore Looker further as a LookML developer.
