What is Looker?

Looker is a cloud-based data platform that lets people explore, analyze, and share business information through easy-to-use visual reports and dashboards. It connects directly to databases, so you can ask questions of your data without moving it around.

Let's break it down

  • Cloud-based: It lives on the internet, not on your own computer, so you can use it from anywhere.
  • Data platform: A tool that helps you collect, organize, and work with data.
  • Explore, analyze, share: You can look at data, find patterns, and then show the results to others.
  • Visual reports and dashboards: Pictures, charts, and tables that make numbers easy to understand.
  • Connects directly to databases: It talks straight to where the data is stored, so nothing needs to be copied first.
  • Ask questions of your data: You can type simple commands (or click) to get answers like “total sales last month”.

Why does it matter?

Because decisions in a company are only as good as the information behind them. Looker makes complex data understandable for non-technical people, speeding up insight, reducing reliance on IT, and helping teams act on the right information at the right time.

Where is it used?

  • A retail chain uses Looker to track sales by store, product, and promotion, letting managers adjust inventory on the fly.
  • A SaaS company builds a dashboard that shows user churn and feature adoption, helping product teams prioritize improvements.
  • A marketing agency creates client reports that visualize campaign performance, saving hours of manual spreadsheet work.
  • A healthcare provider monitors patient wait times and resource utilization to improve scheduling and reduce costs.

Good things about it

  • Real-time access to data without needing data extracts.
  • User-friendly interface that lets non-technical staff build their own queries.
  • Strong governance: admins can control who sees what data.
  • Scalable in the cloud, so it grows with your business.
  • Integrated with many modern BI tools and programming languages for advanced analytics.

Not-so-good things

  • Learning curve for the modeling language (LookML) that developers need to master.
  • Can become expensive for large numbers of users or high query volumes.
  • Performance depends on the underlying database; poorly optimized queries can be slow.
  • Limited offline capability since it’s primarily cloud-focused.