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SQL Runner basics

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Looker Support
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SQL Runner provides a way to directly access your database and to leverage that access in a variety of ways. Using SQL Runner, you can easily navigate the tables in your schema, use an ad hoc Explore from a SQL query, run prewritten descriptive queries on your data, see your SQL Runner history, download results, share queries, add to a LookML project as a derived table, and perform other useful tasks.

This page describes how to navigate to SQL Runner and shows which database dialects support SQL Runner features. See these other documentation pages for information on:

Navigating to SQL Runner

If you have the permissions to see LookML and to use SQL Runner, you can navigate to SQL Runner in two ways:

  • In the Develop menu, select SQL Runner.

  • From an Explore, click SQL on the Data bar to see the SQL. Then click Open in SQL Runner to see the query in SQL Runner, or click Explain in SQL Runner to open SQL Runner and request the database’s execution plan for the query.

Basic SQL Runner usage

This section describes how to use SQL Runner to directly access tables in your schema, run a SQL query on your data, and see query results.

  1. Select the connection you want to query.
  2. Select the schema you want to query.
  3. Select a table to show its columns in the Results area.
  4. Click to collapse/expand the left panel.
  5. Check the database SQL dialect used for the query.
  6. Write a SQL command in the Query area.
  7. Click Run to execute the SQL query.
  8. Look at information returned by the database in the Results area.

SQL Runner visualizations

If your Looker admin has enabled the SQL Runner Vis Labs feature, you can create visualizations directly in SQL Runner.

For more information, see the Using SQL Runner to create queries and Explores documentation page.

Supported database dialects for SQL Runner features

For Looker to support SQL Runner features in your Looker project, your database dialect must also support them. The following table shows which dialects support SQL Runner features in Looker 22.6: