Looker
More info
- Creator
- Lloyd Tabb, Ben Porterfield
- Released
- 2012
- Owner
- Google (since 2020)
- Type
- BI platform
A BI tool that let analysts define their metrics once, in code, instead of in a hundred spreadsheets.
Lloyd Tabb and Ben Porterfield founded Looker in Santa Cruz in 2012. Its core was the LookML modelling language: you describe tables, joins and measures like "revenue" or "active customer" in version-controlled files, and the tool generates SQL against the database. "Revenue" then meant the same thing in every report — which sounds obvious until you've worked somewhere it didn't.
The approach suited cloud warehouses like BigQuery and Snowflake, where the data already sat in one place. Google bought the company for $2.6 billion, closing in 2020, and in 2022 renamed its free Data Studio tool to Looker Studio — mostly creating confusion about which Looker anyone meant.