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My company shares a lot of customers with Looker, and from my point of view there’s a couple reasons why they’re so successful. First, Looker has two layers. T

My company shares a lot of customers with Looker, and from my point of view there’s a couple reasons why they’re so successful. First, Looker has two layers. The dashboard layer gives you tables, charts and filters. The explore layer allows you to go in and build your own pivot tables off the same underlying models. No other BI tool has built an explore layer that’s as successful in practice as Looker’s. Second, the underlying model of both layers is written in code and under version control. This probably makes sense to most HN readers but in the BI world this is very contrarian. If you ask most business users who make BI purchasing decisions, version control and pull requests are the last thing they’ll ask for. But it turns out it’s exactly what you need to maintain a complex BI deployment.

numbsafari 8y ago
The version control and pull request design is exactly why I've selected Looker. LookML enables the power of the explore functionality as well. Looker's visualizations, however, are very weak when compared to the competition. It's been their weakness for years now, and they've really failed to address it. One aspect of Looker that I've also generally enjoyed is their on-boarding and support processes. They do a superb job at this and I feel like they should be a model for startups selling into B2B.
- georgewfraser 8y ago
  I agree that their viz is weak. I comfort myself by saying that this is the easy part and they'll surely fix it eventually...still waiting after two years.
  - groj 8y ago
    I think the community can have a big impact here, there are so many libraries that make it easy to add custom visuals. Specifically, vega is incredible https://vega.github.io/ https://vega.github.io/ and there is a port for Looker https://github.com/groodlooker/vega-lite https://github.com/groodlooker/vega-lite
    - cuchoi 8y ago
      Have you used that port?

numbsafari 8y ago

The version control and pull request design is exactly why I've selected Looker. LookML enables the power of the explore functionality as well. Looker's visualizations, however, are very weak when compared to the competition. It's been their weakness for years now, and they've really failed to address it. One aspect of Looker that I've also generally enjoyed is their on-boarding and support processes. They do a superb job at this and I feel like they should be a model for startups selling into B2B.

georgewfraser 8y ago
I agree that their viz is weak. I comfort myself by saying that this is the easy part and they'll surely fix it eventually...still waiting after two years.
- groj 8y ago
  I think the community can have a big impact here, there are so many libraries that make it easy to add custom visuals. Specifically, vega is incredible https://vega.github.io/ https://vega.github.io/ and there is a port for Looker https://github.com/groodlooker/vega-lite https://github.com/groodlooker/vega-lite
  - cuchoi 8y ago
    Have you used that port?