To use Looker with Actian Avalanche or Vector you will need to configure an Ingres driver. These instructions describe that process, assuming use of a startup script similar to the examples provided on this Looker Github page.

You will need to acquire an Ingres driver JAR, include it as part of the startup process, and add an option to tell Looker to access it.

Installing the Ingres JDBC driver

Follow the steps on the Unpackaged JDBC drivers documentation page using the following values:

driver symbol: ingres

driver entry:

- name: ingres
  dir_name: ingres
  module_path: com.ingres.jdbc.IngresDriver

For the step to put the driver in your dialect’s directory, the path to this file will look like this: looker/custom_jdbc_drivers/ingres/iijdbc.jar.

Connecting Looker to Actian Avalanche or Vector

Configure a database connection via the Looker interface. From the Admin section, select Connections then New Connection. See the Connecting Looker to your database documentation page for more information.

Click on Test These Settings to verify the connection is successful. The Testing database connectivity documentation page has troubleshooting information.

Enabling PDT support

It is possible to enable persistent derived tables (PDTs) using the PDT Overrides column in the Connection Settings page.

To enable PDTs:

1. Create a PDT user in your database for use with the scratch schema, for example looker_scratch.

2. Create a group in your database such as looker_pdt_group.

3. Add both the regular Looker user and the Looker PDT user to the new group.

4. GRANT SELECT on all tables in the regular Looker user’s schema to the PDT user.

5. In Looker’s Connection Settings page, in the PDT Overrides column, enter the PDT user information.

6. The PDT user then runs a GRANT SELECT to the looker_pdt_group for every table it creates.

Feature support

For Looker to support some features, your database dialect must also support them.

In Looker 22.6, Actian Avalance and Vector support the following Looker features: