Looking at Looker: A BI Tool

[scott.brandon34]

Stephen Bailey and myself had a discussion on Monday about Looker as a BI tool and the tech stack he uses for product analytics.  I'm currently reviewing BI/Reporting tools to replace some of my teams current tooling.

Our conversation focused on the pros and cons of Looker and how it fit's into his stack, as well as the wonders of dbt.

Pros.

Quick to build dashboards and explore data, proper version control and CI, depth of features (more than just surface use cases met), lots of integrations.

Con.
Can take time to build out data models of Views -> Explores -> Models before ad-hoc analysis of new data can be done.

It was extremely useful to see Looker from the perspective of someone using it instead of from their Sales Reps (which have also been the best to deal with out of all the BI vendors and demos I've done).