Looker (not Looker Studio) integration

[BKWInsights]

Hi all Is there a looker integration with cube? or plans to do so?

[igorlukanin]

Hi @BKWInsights 👋

Could you please elaborate? What kind of an integration do you envision?

I know that there are companies migrating off Looker to Cube + stand-alone BI tools. At Cube, we have the lkml2cube package that simplifies the migration from LookML to Cube's data models. You can read more in the blog as well.

I'm aware of multiple companies that successfully went down that road, now using Cube Cloud and various BI tools on top. I can add that the solution architecture and customer success teams here at Cube have first-hand experience with Looker and can be really helpful while a Cube Cloud customer transitions from Looker.

[adamstruck]

I have had success with this setup:

Looker -> pg_bouncer (with the query rewrite plugin) -> cube -> data warehouse

This stack allows you to rewrite any SQL queries coming from Looker that use unsupported methods.

[igorlukanin]

Thanks for sharing @adamstruck! In your case, what is the benefit of having Looker on top of Cube?

[acvdarren]

what is the benefit of having Looker on top of Cube?

Not speaking for the issue-raiser, but we have a fragmented internal ecosystem after a number of M&As, and need to support multiple visualization tools. We have a Cube instance stood up and being able to swap out disparate sources of semantic truth while maintaining the existing visualization base is part of the flexibility I value within the Headless BI paradigm.

[mautbach]

Hi! @acvdarren, @adamstruck, thanks for sharing your setup. Can you please share your experience integrating cube with Looker? In particular, how did maintaining LookML models along with cube models go? Have you experienced any performance issues?