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Hey all, as a potential competitor of Looker, I'm not sure how I should feel about this news. :) Here are some of the facts: 1. When Google acquired Alooma, th

Hey all, as a potential competitor of Looker, I'm not sure how I should feel about this news. :) Here are some of the facts: 1. When Google acquired Alooma, they slowed down the development and dropped the support for other destinations such as Redshift and Hive. Even though Alooma is a data pipeline tool which makes it similar to Looker's case, the deal was $150M (compared to $2.6B) so I'm not sure the comparison makes sense. 2. Looker's sale team is so aggressive and their support team is great. In fact, that's why Looker became so big in the last few years. Google is not famous in terms of support. 3. Google is serious on BigQuery and I'm almost sure it will make Looker part of the Google Cloud. Since most of Looker customers are enterprise companies, Google will probably chase them to switch to BigQuery. On the other hand, Google has tons of BI tools (Data Studio, BigQuery BI Engine, etc.) so I'm not sure if Google makes Looker part of their analytics stack. P.S: We're big fans of the LookML and we have developed a LookML alternative based on Jsonnet (https://jsonnet.org/ https://jsonnet.org/) and the great data pipeline tool DBT. (https://github.com/fishtown-analytics/dbt https://github.com/fishtown-analytics/dbt). Here is how it looks like: https://github.com/rakam-io/segment-recipe/blob/master/event/pages.event.jsonnet https://github.com/rakam-io/segment-recipe/blob/master/event...

bob_roboto 7y ago
> When Google acquired Alooma, they slowed down the development and dropped the support for other destinations such as Redshift and Hive. Do you have a source for that? As far as I can see on their website [1] they still support it [1] https://www.alooma.com/integrations/to/redshift https://www.alooma.com/integrations/to/redshift
tmountain 7y ago
Is there an official project for your LookML alternative or is it part of a larger Github repo?
- buremba 7y ago
  We actually developed this feature (we call it recipe) 2 weeks ago and we're working on the documentation at the moment. Since we focus on product data, the first recipe is written for Segment Warehouse. When users connect to their Segment warehouse, we automatically install this recipe, they can fork our Segment recipe to build their models on top of our base recipe. Thanks to DBT, we support some advanced features such as incremental materialization and since our focus is on product data, we have embedded features such as funnel & retention & segmentation. Our product is not feature-complete compared to Looker but we're implementing features & working on stability for the last few months. One of our team members is working on automatic LookML converter to Rakam Recipe so that we can have more coverage of LookML. We will definitely focus more on Looker use-cases after this acquisition. :) Would love to talk if anyone is interested! (email is in my bio)
  - polskibus 7y ago
    is the Rakam Recipe sth like an ETL template for a given data source type ?
    - buremba 7y ago
      That's correct but we're not an ETL engine. We use DBT for the data transformation and you basically define what the measures/dimensions/filters are in this template so that your non-technical people run ad-hoc queries without any need to write SQL queries.
sytse 7y ago
Does your lookML alternative support the use cases of Meltano Model https://meltano.com/docs/architecture.html#meltano-model https://meltano.com/docs/architecture.html#meltano-model ? We would love to replace ours with something open source if it is better. We love DBT.
- buremba 7y ago
  Do you have the Meltano models in a repository? It looks similar to LookML so the use-case is similar. I would love to hear more and see some of your example Meltano models, could you please send an email to emre [at] rakam.io?
  - dmor 7y ago
    Yes, you can see the full list of model repos for Meltano here: https://gitlab.com/meltano?utf8=%E2%9C%93&filter=model- https://gitlab.com/meltano?utf8=%E2%9C%93&filter=model- Would love to collaborate, do you want to join our Zoom call https://gitlab.zoom.us/j/542273985 https://gitlab.zoom.us/j/542273985? (Anyone else who wants to join in is welcome, the link is open)
    - sytse 7y ago
      The team just posted a blog post about this live open call https://meltano.com/blog/2019/06/06/live-join-us-to-discuss-building-an-open-source-alternative-to-lookml/ https://meltano.com/blog/2019/06/06/live-join-us-to-discuss-...
      - dmor 7y ago
        The call just wrapped so folks could grab lunch, but anyone who is interested can see next steps for the project in collaboration with @buremba and the Rakam team here https://meltano.com/blog/2019/06/06/rakam-is-collaborating-with-meltano-to-define-an-open-source-alternative-to-lookml/ https://meltano.com/blog/2019/06/06/rakam-is-collaborating-w... We have launched a new open source project to work on the spec and collaborators are welcome
mirceal 7y ago
you should feel pretty good. i’ve yet to see a product acquired by google that did well after.
- jedberg 7y ago
  YouTube?
  - lmkg 7y ago
    DoubleClick?
    - syrrim 7y ago
      Android?
      - mirceal 7y ago
        android is great /s https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/06/google-confirms-2017-supply-chain-attack-that-sneaked-backdoor-on-android-devices/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/06/googl...
        fphhotchips 7y ago
        Yes. Security problems are famously unique to Android. https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2019/01/29/apple-ios-12-1-3-release-iphone-xs-max-xr-problem-facetime-problem-video-calls-audio-calls/#4b9da31a4020 https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2019/01/29/apple-io...
    - ddalex 7y ago
      Android?
      - mirceal 7y ago
        android is both a success and a failure. i used to be a huge android fannoi before switching to iphone. even for a highly technical person, maintaining an android phone is too much.
1290cc 7y ago
Honestly I wouldn't worry about it, if anything Google Cloud just raised the profile of every BI product out there. I work very closely with the Google Cloud team as a technology partner. With the recent hire of Thomas Kurian he has to make a big splash at Google while good will is forthcoming and I expect he will continue to authorize significant acquisitions to help build out their cloud to compete with Azure/AWS. The next piece of the puzzle will be an integration platform to help bring it all together.
infinite8s 7y ago
I'll repeat a comment from a slightly related thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20053628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20053628 I've found something like a LookML syntax backed by SQLAlchemy Core has allowed me to implement something like Looker (but tied to my own visualization stack)
- polskibus 7y ago
  How does it work with parameterized filtering, time intelligence, etc ? Does the user have to modify the script or can they do it through point and click UI.
  - infinite8s 7y ago
    It's not quite point and click, although I've implemented Tableau like frontends on Qt/javascript which construct a pivot description, and then get compiled using SQLAlchemy core into a sql query that drives the DB. Still working out the best UX to expose to the user, but I think I'll go the approach of Mode since our users are sophisticated enough to write analytic SQL.
ewrcoffee 7y ago
> Looker's sale team is so aggressive and their support team is great. In fact, that's why Looker became so big in the last few years. Google is not famous in terms of support. That's probably the major reason of the acquisition.
cdumler 7y ago
Don't worry about it. It's undoubtedly an aquihire. If there is one thing that Google demonstrates consistently is a complete disregard for relationships with external parties. This product will die once Google stops communicating with external companies. This is your opportunity to reassure your partners you're not going away and to reach out to Looker's companies to see if you can help stay in-front of this. Just don't be a dick about it: "Hey, just saying that Google is known for letting products die. If you're concerned about this, we'd love to know how to help you with those concerns."
- simonebrunozzi 7y ago
  I doubt that $2.6B is for an acquihire.

bob_roboto 7y ago

> When Google acquired Alooma, they slowed down the development and dropped the support for other destinations such as Redshift and Hive. Do you have a source for that? As far as I can see on their website [1] they still support it [1] https://www.alooma.com/integrations/to/redshift https://www.alooma.com/integrations/to/redshift

tmountain 7y ago

Is there an official project for your LookML alternative or is it part of a larger Github repo?

buremba 7y ago
We actually developed this feature (we call it recipe) 2 weeks ago and we're working on the documentation at the moment. Since we focus on product data, the first recipe is written for Segment Warehouse. When users connect to their Segment warehouse, we automatically install this recipe, they can fork our Segment recipe to build their models on top of our base recipe. Thanks to DBT, we support some advanced features such as incremental materialization and since our focus is on product data, we have embedded features such as funnel & retention & segmentation. Our product is not feature-complete compared to Looker but we're implementing features & working on stability for the last few months. One of our team members is working on automatic LookML converter to Rakam Recipe so that we can have more coverage of LookML. We will definitely focus more on Looker use-cases after this acquisition. :) Would love to talk if anyone is interested! (email is in my bio)
- polskibus 7y ago
  is the Rakam Recipe sth like an ETL template for a given data source type ?
  - buremba 7y ago
    That's correct but we're not an ETL engine. We use DBT for the data transformation and you basically define what the measures/dimensions/filters are in this template so that your non-technical people run ad-hoc queries without any need to write SQL queries.

sytse 7y ago

Does your lookML alternative support the use cases of Meltano Model https://meltano.com/docs/architecture.html#meltano-model https://meltano.com/docs/architecture.html#meltano-model ? We would love to replace ours with something open source if it is better. We love DBT.

buremba 7y ago
Do you have the Meltano models in a repository? It looks similar to LookML so the use-case is similar. I would love to hear more and see some of your example Meltano models, could you please send an email to emre [at] rakam.io?
- dmor 7y ago
  Yes, you can see the full list of model repos for Meltano here: https://gitlab.com/meltano?utf8=%E2%9C%93&filter=model- https://gitlab.com/meltano?utf8=%E2%9C%93&filter=model- Would love to collaborate, do you want to join our Zoom call https://gitlab.zoom.us/j/542273985 https://gitlab.zoom.us/j/542273985? (Anyone else who wants to join in is welcome, the link is open)
  - sytse 7y ago
    The team just posted a blog post about this live open call https://meltano.com/blog/2019/06/06/live-join-us-to-discuss-building-an-open-source-alternative-to-lookml/ https://meltano.com/blog/2019/06/06/live-join-us-to-discuss-...
    - dmor 7y ago
      The call just wrapped so folks could grab lunch, but anyone who is interested can see next steps for the project in collaboration with @buremba and the Rakam team here https://meltano.com/blog/2019/06/06/rakam-is-collaborating-with-meltano-to-define-an-open-source-alternative-to-lookml/ https://meltano.com/blog/2019/06/06/rakam-is-collaborating-w... We have launched a new open source project to work on the spec and collaborators are welcome

mirceal 7y ago

you should feel pretty good. i’ve yet to see a product acquired by google that did well after.

jedberg 7y ago
YouTube?
- lmkg 7y ago
  DoubleClick?
  - syrrim 7y ago
    Android?
    - mirceal 7y ago
      android is great /s https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/06/google-confirms-2017-supply-chain-attack-that-sneaked-backdoor-on-android-devices/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/06/googl...
      - fphhotchips 7y ago
        Yes. Security problems are famously unique to Android. https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2019/01/29/apple-ios-12-1-3-release-iphone-xs-max-xr-problem-facetime-problem-video-calls-audio-calls/#4b9da31a4020 https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2019/01/29/apple-io...
  - ddalex 7y ago
    Android?
    - mirceal 7y ago
      android is both a success and a failure. i used to be a huge android fannoi before switching to iphone. even for a highly technical person, maintaining an android phone is too much.

1290cc 7y ago

Honestly I wouldn't worry about it, if anything Google Cloud just raised the profile of every BI product out there. I work very closely with the Google Cloud team as a technology partner. With the recent hire of Thomas Kurian he has to make a big splash at Google while good will is forthcoming and I expect he will continue to authorize significant acquisitions to help build out their cloud to compete with Azure/AWS. The next piece of the puzzle will be an integration platform to help bring it all together.

infinite8s 7y ago

I'll repeat a comment from a slightly related thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20053628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20053628 I've found something like a LookML syntax backed by SQLAlchemy Core has allowed me to implement something like Looker (but tied to my own visualization stack)

polskibus 7y ago
How does it work with parameterized filtering, time intelligence, etc ? Does the user have to modify the script or can they do it through point and click UI.
- infinite8s 7y ago
  It's not quite point and click, although I've implemented Tableau like frontends on Qt/javascript which construct a pivot description, and then get compiled using SQLAlchemy core into a sql query that drives the DB. Still working out the best UX to expose to the user, but I think I'll go the approach of Mode since our users are sophisticated enough to write analytic SQL.

ewrcoffee 7y ago

> Looker's sale team is so aggressive and their support team is great. In fact, that's why Looker became so big in the last few years. Google is not famous in terms of support. That's probably the major reason of the acquisition.

cdumler 7y ago

Don't worry about it. It's undoubtedly an aquihire. If there is one thing that Google demonstrates consistently is a complete disregard for relationships with external parties. This product will die once Google stops communicating with external companies. This is your opportunity to reassure your partners you're not going away and to reach out to Looker's companies to see if you can help stay in-front of this. Just don't be a dick about it: "Hey, just saying that Google is known for letting products die. If you're concerned about this, we'd love to know how to help you with those concerns."

simonebrunozzi 7y ago
I doubt that $2.6B is for an acquihire.