Google to Acquire Looker

> Looker is a fantastic tool, but its not something which is useful from day one, and at least currently has a high enough price tag attached to it that they involve a lot of sales engineering in getting new customers to a point where they're able to query data they care about.

That describes most enterprise software, so it's not a unique challenge.

Smart move. Google wants to own the entire data infrastructure. Alooma (acquired in February) gets your data from various sources into BigQuery, then all the analysis is done in Looker.

Unfortunate news for non-Looker users: Supposedly Alooma stopped supporting Redshift and Snowflake integrations following the acquisition, since those compete with BigQuery. If you're using Looker with Redshift or Snowflake you should be concerned.

Edit: By “stopped supporting” I meant they deprioritized it from the roadmap. I do not mean that they disabled the integration.

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.

$2.6B

> Google wants to own the entire data infrastructure.

Not just the infrastructure. They want the data too!