Getting started with Looker

Best Practices

Documentation

Community

Training

Certification

Articles in this section

See more

Amazon Aurora MySQL

Avatar
Looker Support
  • Updated
Follow

To connect Looker to Amazon Aurora MySQL, follow the instructions found on the documentation page for connecting to MySQL on Amazon RDS.

In addition to the steps in the Amazon RDS instructions, Amazon Aurora may need further setup, depending on your configuration. If you have a redirected read-only endpoint for Amazon Aurora, or if you want to leverage persistent derived tables (PDTs), see the following sections.

Alternate failover and load balancing modes

Amazon Aurora MySQL can be configured to use alternate failover and load balancing modes to choose the appropriate JDBC connection behavior you want. Check the linked documentation to see how these alternative parameters change the behavior.

You can set the lookerFailover parameter in the Additional Params field to control these modes.

The options can be used to change the JDBC string as follows:

  • lookerFailover=false: jdbc:mysql:hostname...
  • lookerFailover=sequential: jdbc:mysql:sequential:hostname...
    • You can do the same with lookerFailover=loadbalance, lookerFailover=replication, and lookerFailover=aurora
  • If lookerFailover is not included, the default behavior is: jdbc:mysql:aurora:hostname...
  • If cluster-ro is in the hostname, the default behavior is: jdbc:mysql:hostname...

Configuring Amazon Aurora MySQL for PDTs

In order to leverage persistent derived tables (PDTs) with Aurora, you must use MySQL replication, not Amazon Aurora’s default replication, which is read-only. You must set the read_only parameter to 0 to make the MySQL replica writable, as described in our documentation on RDS and temporary tables.

If you don’t want to grant write access to the database, you can copy and paste the derived table SQL into the sql_table_name parameter of a view file as shown here. This creates a subquery that is used at query time:

view: my_name { sql_table_name: (sql_of_derived_table_goes_here) ;; }

For more details on Aurora replication, see the AWS documentation.

Adding the connection

add

New in Looker 22.6, Amazon Aurora MySQL database connections have the Cost Estimate connection setting, which lets you enable cost estimates for Explore queries and SQL Runner queries on Amazon Aurora MySQL database connections.

After completing the database configuration, you can connect to the database from Looker. In the Admin section of Looker, select Connections, and then select New Connection.

Fill out the connection details. The majority of these settings are common to most database dialects. They are described on the Connecting Looker to your database documentation page.

After configuring the connection options, click on Test These Settings to verify that the connection to Aurora 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, Amazon Aurora supports the following Looker features:

Related articles