Looker Tutorials

Helpful Looker Tutorials

Persistent Derived Tables: When and How to Use Them

August 25, 2026

Derived tables can be a powerful tool in a Looker developer's arsenal. They allow you to create tables on-the-fly from existing tables, essentially enabling you to perform ETL (extract, transform, load) operations directly within Looker. Looker's LookML provides two types of derived tables: non-persistent and persistent. In this post, we will focus on Persistent Derived Tables (PDTs), understand when to use them, and delve into the how.

Working with the Looker API 4.0 and SDKs (2026)

August 25, 2026

Looker API 3.x was removed in 2023. This refreshed guide covers API keys, logging in to API 4.0, the official looker_sdk Python SDK, run_inline_query and run_look, loading results into another system, and a migration map for scripts still calling /api/3.1.

Looker + BigQuery Cost Optimization in the Editions Era

August 25, 2026

Flat-rate BigQuery pricing is gone. This refreshed guide covers Editions versus on-demand, slot baseline and max autoscaling, physical versus logical storage billing, partitioning and clustering from the Looker side, datagroup caching, PDT keys, aggregate awareness, and attributing spend to dashboards and users.

Custom Visualizations in Looker: Palettes, Liquid HTML, and the Custom Viz API

August 25, 2026

Custom visualizations in Looker, done right: color collections and themes (there is no color_palette LookML parameter), Liquid conditional formatting with value and rendered_value, and a working custom visualization built on the Visualization API and installed through Admin > Platform > Visualizations or the Marketplace.

Standing Up Looker (Google Cloud core): Console to First Model

August 25, 2026

Standing up Looker in 2026: provisioning a Looker (Google Cloud core) instance from the Cloud console, Google OAuth sign-in, connecting BigQuery or another warehouse with a service account and PDT schema, creating a LookML project in Git, and the day-one settings that save pain later.

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