The Podium - May 22nd, 2019

Izzy Miller, Community Manager at Looker

May 22, 2019

Ohayo gozaimasu!

The Podium is a bit tardy this time around, but with a great reason! I’ve been busy getting adjusted to my new habitat of Tokyo, Japan — Looker’s global push is well underway, and I’m thrilled to get to help spark the Looker Community in a brand new country.

Speaking of global Looker-ing, last week’s first-ever Looker_Hack: London was nothing short of fantastic! Massive kudos to everyone who attended and hacked away at an awesome project. Keep your eyes peeled for videos and write-ups of the projects, and make sure to tune into the next Podium for a special Japanese edition.

Izzy Miller
Community Manager, Looker

Questions and Answers

Accounting for missing data in a model

Ianterrellamx chose a meaty subject for their first post! I won’t try to describe it since it took me a few reads to fully understand the problem, but Pan_Sun and bens hopped right in with some suggestions. Ian came back with a solution using Native Derived Tables, too. I feel smarter just having read the thread :)
Looker Community Discussion — Accounting for missing data in a model

Sorting on multiple fields

This one’s a little more simple, but always good to know. Cristian was hoping to sort on multiple columns — in this case, it’s as simple as shift+clicking on the fields you want to sort by. You can keep clicking to reverse the order too, just like a normal sort.
Looker Community Discussion — Sorting on multiple fields

Community Spotlight - Menashe Hamm

Our guest this week is @menashe. Welcome, Menashe!

What do you do for work?

I’m a data analyst at a DIY platform with tens of millions of monthly visits.

What’s your secret skill or talent?

I can walk and chew gum — at the same time!

What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever done with Looker?

Most of the coolness in Looker is in its features: I just use them. Probably the coolest thing I’ve done — this was for my previous employer — was to plot high-accuracy location readings on a map to see what paths people took.

Most useful Looker feature?

Ephemeral (non-persistent) derived tables with Liquid. Looker’s filters and parameters, coupled with the _in_query, _is_selected, date_start, and date_end Liquid variables, allow me to control the SQL in the table for faster, accurate querying.

Milkshake or ice cream sundae?

Sundae. But do I really need to choose?

What’s your biggest Looker feature request?

I think that would have to be better date filtering. Right now, getting dates between an absolute date and a relative date is difficult or at least unintuitive for the typical user. Users mention this relatively often, which is why I’m prioritizing as my biggest request. If I can mention another, though, it’s x-axis annotations.

What’s the question I forgot to ask that you’re dying to answer?

Favorite mathematical proof? Quite possibly this one.

Community Knowledge Share

Update Snowflake database with Looker Action

JeffHuth posted a gorgeous tutorial on setting up a database write-back action for Snowflake. It’s fantastically written and a great tutorial on building out any kind of custom action!
Looker Community Discussion — Update snowflake database with Looker Action

Date comparison block

Bencannon built an excellent block for doing period-over-period date comparisons. Very well written and works great, really well done Bencannon. And shout out to Bens for porting it over to MSSQL so quickly!
Looker Community Discussion — Date comparison block

Join the Conversation

There you have it! Head over to the Community to ask any Looker questions to the cool cats that hang out there. Or, share your comments about any specific discussions and tips that have helped you out lately for a chance to get featured in the next Podium.

And as always, send in your questions for the next Spotlight feature (I’m running out of questions, so it’s about to get real middle school truth-or-dare-y up in here if I don’t get some new ones quick!)