Encrypting 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.

If you’re interested in using SSL encryption, see this official Greenplum security configuration guide.

Users and security

Change some_password_here to a unique, secure password:

CREATE USER looker WITH ENCRYPTED PASSWORD 'password';
GRANT CONNECT ON DATABASE database_name to looker;
\c database_name
GRANT SELECT ON ALL SEQUENCES IN SCHEMA public TO looker;
GRANT SELECT ON ALL TABLES IN SCHEMA public TO looker;

To grant Looker the necessary permissions to cancel its queries, run:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION pg_kill_connection(integer) RETURNS boolean AS 'select pg_terminate_backend($1);' LANGUAGE SQL SECURITY DEFINER;

Temp schema setup

Create a schema owned by the Looker user:

CREATE SCHEMA looker_scratch AUTHORIZATION looker;

Feature support

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

In Looker 22.6, Greenplum supports the following Looker features:

Next steps

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