Encrypting network traffic

Looker strongly recommends encrypting network traffic between the Looker application and your database. To learn more about using SSL encryption, see the Microsoft documentation.

Users and security

First, connect to the master database on your server with your server admin login:

CREATE LOGIN looker WITH PASSWORD = '';

Connect to your Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics database and create a database user:

CREATE USER looker FOR LOGIN looker;

Looker must be authorized to detect and stop currently running queries, which requires the following permissions:

ALTER ANY CONNECTION VIEW SERVER STATE

To grant these permissions, run the following:

GRANT CONTROL ON DATABASE::userDatabase TO looker;

Depending on the Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics tier being used, you may also need to explicitly grant the VIEW DATABASE STATE permission.

To grant VIEW DATABASE STATE permission, run the following:

GRANT VIEW DATABASE STATE TO looker;

Temp schema setup

Create a schema owned by the Looker user:

CREATE SCHEMA looker_scratch AUTHORIZATION looker;

Adding the connection

Use the Looker interface to configure the database connection: In the Admin section of Looker, select Connections, and then select New Connection.

Enter the connection information. The majority of the settings are common to most database dialects and are described on the Connecting Looker to your database documentation page. The following fields have additional information that applies to Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics:

Dialect: Select Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics.
Remote Host:Port: Enter the hostname and port (the default port is 1433).

If you need to specify a non-default port other than 1433 and your database requires the use of a comma instead of a colon, you can add useCommaHostPortSeparator=true in the Additional Params field further down in the connection settings, which will allow you to use a comma in the Remote Host:Port field. For example:

jdbc:sqlserver://hostname,1434

Click on Test These Settings to verify that the connection to your database is successful. See the Testing database connectivity documentation page for troubleshooting information.

Click Add Connection to save the connection.

Feature support

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

In Looker 22.6, Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics supports the following Looker features:

Next steps

After completing the database configuration, you can connect to the database from Looker using these directions.

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