Don’t Looker back in anger
By Alasdair Fowler
Feb 13th 2018Towards the end of 2017, the Marketing Team heard rumours of a new data analytics platform to replace the ‘Viper’ interface, which we built in-house using SQL. Although Viper provided most of the key metrics needed to optimise marketing campaigns and track performance, looking at the data would sometimes raise more questions than the data could answer. Inevitably, this led to a steady stream of requests to the Data and Insights Team for bespoke SQL queries, which were time-consuming to write and not always an effective use of their time — especially when the query might only be run once. It seemed likely we were fast approaching ‘peak query requests’, where demand would far outstrip supply and the Data and Insights Team would only have time to produce data at the cost of insight. I Got the Fever The promise of a platform that builds complex SQL queries with a few clicks had obvious appeal, but of course there was some scepticism — there always will be when something claims to revolutionise the way we work. However, only two months on, I can’t imagine life without Looker. As soon as we got our hands on Looker, it was possible to build the Viper reports and go beyond what they could provide. Choosing different ways to ‘slice and dice’ the data is so simple and, because Looker queries the database directly, the outputs are always live. It has allowed the Marketing Team, and other areas of the business, to answer their own data questions, even with no SQL knowledge whatsoever. Now, when the Data team isn’t adding new features to Looker, they are free to spend time on larger, more adventurous projects, which deliver a much bigger business impact.