Encrypt network traffic

Looker strongly recommends encrypting network traffic between the Looker application and your database. Consider one of the options described on the Enabling secure database access documentation page.

The Exasol JDBC drivers support encrypted connections. If you’re interested, see Exasol’s documentation.

Create a Looker user

First, create a designated Looker user and give it the ability to create sessions:

CREATE USER LOOKER IDENTIFIED BY "<password>";
GRANT CREATE SESSION TO LOOKER;

Put the password in double quotes as shown above. Otherwise, it will be stored as case-insensitive; ChangeIt will be stored as CHANGEIT.

Give the Looker user the appropriate SELECT permissions for the schema or tables you plan to access from Looker:

GRANT SELECT ON <tables that will be used by LOOKER>;

Alternatively, you can grant all privileges:

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON SCHEMA <YOUR_SCHEMA> TO LOOKER;

Alternatively, if you do not want to have to re-run GRANT statements on newly created tables in the future:

GRANT SELECT ANY TABLE TO LOOKER;

Persistent derived tables

If you want to enable PDTs for your Looker connection to Exasol, run this command:

CREATE SCHEMA LOOKER_SCRATCH;
ALTER SCHEMA LOOKER_SCRATCH CHANGE OWNER LOOKER;

Alternatively, you can grant all privileges:

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON SCHEMA LOOKER_SCRATCH TO LOOKER;

Enable symmetric aggregates

To allow Exasol to take advantage of symmetric aggregates, create the hexstring2dec function:

OPEN SCHEMA ; create or replace function hexstring2dec(hexstring in varchar(32)) return decimal(36,0) is pos smallint; current_hexstring char(1); current_hexstring_dec smallint; hexstring_length smallint; res decimal(36,0); begin if hexstring is null then return null; end if; hexstring_length := length(hexstring); res := 0; pos := 1; while pos <= hexstring_length do current_hexstring := substr(hexstring,pos,1); if current_hexstring in ('A','B','C','D','E','F') then current_hexstring_dec := ascii(current_hexstring) - ascii('A') + 10; else current_hexstring_dec := to_number(current_hexstring); end if; res := (res * 16) + current_hexstring_dec; pos := pos + 1; end while; return res; end hexstring2dec; / GRANT EXECUTE ON FUNCTION hexstring2dec;

Feature support

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

In Looker 22.6, Exasol supports the following Looker features:

Next steps

After completing the database connection, configure authentication options.

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