Looker

Audience: Data Owners and Users

Content Summary: Looker, an Immuta technology partner, is a modern platform for exploring data, analyzing trends, and sharing insights. Looker can connect to the Immuta Query Engine and consume data via Immuta's SQL Access Pattern.

Overview

Looker, an Immuta technology partner, is a modern platform for exploring data, analyzing trends, and sharing insights. Looker has several compelling features, including the LookML data definition language, a built-in SQL runner, and powerful charting capabilities. It is easy to connect to Immuta, and its ability to parameterize connection credentials make collaboration easy.

Setting up a new Looker connection

Looker Admins have the ability to set up new database connections. The connection information for your instance can be found under the SQL Credentials tab of your profile page in the Immuta console.

Step-by-step details for creating a PostgreSQL data source, and exposing it as a new Looker project, can be found in Looker's official documentation.

Connecting with user attributes

In many tools, each data user must create their own personalized connection to the database. One powerful feature of Looker is the ability to parameterize database connection credentials based on individual user attributes. That is, the Immuta database connection can be set up so that users will access data using their personal credentials, rather than using a set that is hard-coded during setup. This allows users to share artifacts while only receiving data that is compliant with their individual policy sets.

To do this, an administrative user should follow Looker's documentation to create two new user attributes (e.g., immuta_user and immuta_password). When setting up the database connection, instead of entering an individual's username and password, the admin can pass in these two attributes. Now, every time Looker attempts to connect to the Immuta PostgreSQL query engine, it will pass in the two attributes recorded in the data user's profile.