Looker 21.12

Potentially breaking changes

• A new Enhanced Navigation Labs feature offers a new UI that simplifies user workflows with unified left-hand navigation and more performant routing between common pages and content.
• The Looker extension framework is out of Labs and now generally available under Admin > Platform.
• The Add Looks to dashboards feature is now behind a legacy flag. It is off by default and must be manually switched on.
• The Upgraded Explore Field Picker includes Quick Start analyses, popular fields, and other enhancements and is generally available. The legacy field picker is available as a legacy feature until 21.16, at which point it will be permanently unavailable.
• The Upgraded Explore Field Picker includes Quick Starts, popular fields, and other enhancements and is generally available. The old field picker is available as a legacy feature until 21.16, at which point it will be permanently unavailable.
• Fields of type YesNo will have user-written SQL wrapped in parentheses when the fields are used in a SQL filter.
• The Render Long Tables Labs feature is now on by default for all instances.
• The Make public… keyboard shortcuts Command-Shift-P (Mac) and Ctrl+Shift+P (Windows) have been removed from Explores and Looks.

Enhanced navigation

• The Development Mode toggle is now located on the bottom left of the new left enhanced navigation panel, and its Labs toggle is off by default.
• The admin panel is accessible through the gear icon in the top right menu.

Grouping and quick calculations

• Use filter expressions to define the criteria for inclusion in each group.
• Create a group from the More menu in the field picker or the gear icon in the data table.
• Use as an alternative to Lexp with nested if() statements or case statements.
• Create some of the most commonly used table calculations with a few quick gestures.
• Available for anyone with the Custom Fields Labs feature enabled.

Marketplace Auto Install

• When Marketplace Auto Install is toggled on, Looker will automatically install and update these Marketplace applications.
• Currently, API Explorer is the only extension classified as auto-installable, but more Looker-built applications will be added in the future.

PDT Development Mode visibility

• Modelers can now see the state of their trigger-based PDTs while in Development Mode both in the IDE and on the PDT Admin page.
• Users need see_pdts permission to be able to leverage this feature.

NDT Development Mode filter

• The dev_filters LookML parameter works in a similar way to the if dev, if prod SQL filters.
• Modelers who are working in Development Mode can restrict the size of a dataset in LookML for an NDT to make it faster and easier to iterate on the NDT definition when working with a large dataset.

Looker 21.10

Potentially breaking changes

• Looker will no longer send blank emails when a schedule runs with include_links disabled and the Looker instance has the Send Link Only policy enabled. Looker will now warn users who attempt to turn on the Send Link Only policy that the setting may cause some schedules to not work.
• When you’re creating a schedule to send once, the schedule’s filter options will default to dashboard filters rather than to the saved schedule plan filter options.
• Looker components 2.0.0 is now available. To reduce the package size of @looker/components, all the date picker and date functions are now in a new package, @looker/components-date.
• The incremental PDTs feature is now out of Labs and is generally available.

Support for materialized views

• Leverage your database’s materialized view functionality to persist your derived tables.
• Specify materialized_view: yes for a native derived table or a SQL-based derived table.
• Materialized views are currently supported for BigQuery and Redshift dialects.

Looker components 2.0.0 is now available

• To reduce the package size of @looker/components, all the date picker and date functions are now in a new package, @looker/components-date.

New supported dialect

• Firebolt can be fully configured using the database configurations.
• See a list of all the dialects Looker supports on the Looker dialects documentation page.

create-looker-extension

• create-looker-extension makes it easier to create new extensions from scratch.
• create-looker-extension allows Looker extension developers to have zero install dependencies (besides yarn) and drastically streamlines initial configuration to just one command.

Looker 21.8

Potentially breaking changes

• The Looker EULA for trial instances has been updated.
• The LookML Model Explore API endpoint now returns an original_view attribute for the fields in the Explore. The value is the original view name where the field was defined.
• The LookML Validator now validates custom fields for LookML dashboards.
• The color contrast in data tables has been increased, which improves the accessibility of data tables in Explores.
• The Clear Cache & Refresh option for embedded dashboards and tiles has been removed.
• New query streamers are enabled by default for all non-cached streamable queries. Admin users may opt to use the old streamers by enabling the Legacy Query Streaming legacy feature.
• The LookML Diagram is now generally available.
• On the System Activity Performance dashboard, the history source for data_download_api has changed from api to system, and the history source for authenticated_download has changed from system to action_hub.
• Looker dialects that use the MariaDB JDBC driver will default to using enabledSslProtocolSuites=TLSv1,TLSv1.1,TLSv1.2.
  The affected dialects are MySQL, MariaDB, Google Cloud MySQL, Amazon Aurora MySQL, Clustrix, MemSQL, and MongoDB Connector for BI. For these dialects, if your database does not support TLS 1.2, your database connection will break unless you explicitly set the following in the Additional Params field of your connection settings:
  enabledSslProtocolSuites=TLSv1,TLSv1.1.
  To check if your database’s SSL library supports TLS 1.2, you can run SHOW GLOBAL VARIABLES LIKE 'tls_version';

Mobile app improvements

• The Looker mobile app is now localized in the same 22 languages that the Looker web app supports.
• Admin users can now enable Force mobile authentication to require users to sign back in to Looker whenever they open the mobile app.
• Users can now enable biometric authentication for a speedier login experience.
• Deep linking will direct users who open a Look or dashboard link from their mobile phone (email, Slack, message) directly to the Looker mobile app.

System Activity: Content Usage Explore enhancements

• Eight new Quick Start queries are available to use as starting points for analysis.
• A required filter for including or excluding deleted Looks and dashboards has been added.
• Fields have undergone a general cleanup: More group labels have been added, unused and/or discontinued fields have been hidden, and context has been added to descriptions.

API Explorer

• The new beta API Explorer is now available through the Looker Marketplace.
• Users can now quickly navigate to related API methods and types.
• Users can also compare different Looker API versions that use various SDK languages.

Looker error catalog

• Refer to the new error catalog to learn how to troubleshoot common errors that surface in Looker.
• Each error shows where in the Looker platform the error can occur: Dashboards, Explores, SQL Runner.

Looker 21.6

Potentially breaking changes

• All Looker custom visualizations now use a sandboxed iframe to promote security. Unsandboxed custom visualizations will no longer be supported in the product.
• The Looker extension framework can be used to create iframes if use_iframes entitlement is added to the extension. Extensions that have the use_embeds entitlement are automatically granted the use_iframes entitlement.
• The render_tasks API endpoint will no longer support the combination of result_format and dashboard_style and will return a 422 error, unprocessable entity.
• When the Segment Group action is used, Looker’s payload will no longer include a segment_anonymous_id and will only send the segment_group_id when the segment_group_id LookML tag is present.
• Looker no longer supports the IBM DB2 Warehouse on Cloud dialect. Instead, for DB2 databases, you can use IBM DB2 on AS400 or IBM DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows (LUW).
• Trend lines are no longer supported on charts with a series positioning of Stacked or Stacked Percentage, with a grid layout of By Row, or with an x-axis scale type of Ordinal. In any of these scenarios, an error will be rendered.
• Introducing the new legacy feature, Syntax Tolerant Liquid, which introduces new checks for valid Liquid syntax and ensures that all errors are categorized as informational. You may see new validation messages for existing Liquid syntax after you update to 21.6.
• A syntax warning will now be rendered if the keyword bigquery_datetime_as_timestamp is included in a model.

End of life: Unsandboxed custom visualizations

• Unsandboxed custom visualizations will no longer be supported in the product.
• A Looker admin will need to migrate all existing unsandboxed custom visualizations using the Migrate Existing Visualizations option before the Looker instance is updated to Looker 21.6.

New Users Page (Beta) Labs feature

• Supports pagination and has an improved and easier-to-use interface.
• Provides better performance for customers with large numbers of users, groups, and roles.

Metadata Sidebar is GA

• Gives modelers insight into how objects (fields, views, and models) are used throughout projects.
• The sidebar is set to quick help by default; users can toggle between quick help and metadata at any time.

Introducing support for Databricks

• Looker has added official dialect support for Databricks. See the Databricks documentation page for more information.

Looker 21.4

Potentially breaking changes

• Referencing a measure — such as COUNT, SUM, or AVG — from another view that does not have a primary key declared in a one_to_many join now renders this LookML model error: Field '(?)' depends on '(?)' which cannot be calculated because of a one_to_many or many_to_many join. Consider adding a primary key to '(?)'
• The List component is now enriched with additional features. Additionally, there are two new components for lists: OrderedList and UnorderedList.
• The LookML IDE renders the following new warning if the dashboard file declaration is invalid: Invalid dashboard declaration. Dashboard must be declared as: <dashboard_name>.
• The --scheduler-threads=<i> startup flag can no longer be used to determine alert runs or to disable alerts. For these tasks, use the --alerts-scheduler-threads=<i> flag.
• The create_query API endpoint now only accepts filter values of type: string.
• The bigquery_datetime_as_timestamp legacy feature has been removed. Any field with datatype: datetime declared on a model using a BigQuery standard SQL connection will now be treated as a BigQuery datetime type field.
• Looker Dialect Vertica 6 has been deprecated. Vertica remains a fully supported Looker dialect.
• Due to several Slack API endpoint deprecations, users must upgrade to Lookerbot version 0.0.16 or later for Lookerbot to function properly.

Looker mobile app is now GA

• The Looker mobile app includes the new and improved dashboard experience and gives users the ability to report bugs and feedback in-app.
• The mobile app Labs feature, Mobile App Integration, will be removed as of Looker 21.4.
• All instances on Looker 21.4 or later will have Looker mobile app access enabled by default.

Incremental PDTs

• Incremental PDTs enable Looker to append fresh data to a PDT instead of rebuilding the entire table.
• The PDT Activity Dashboard page has been added to the System Activity model and is now accessible from the Persistent Derived Tables page.
• Supported PDT types include native (LookML), SQL-based, and aggregate tables.
• Supported dialects include BigQuery standard SQL, MySQL, Postgres, Redshift, Snowflake, Vertica, and Azure Synapse…with more dialects coming soon!

Render Long Tables Labs feature

• Enabling the Render Long Tables experimental Labs feature reduces the PDF or PNG rendering time of long tables by displaying a faster-loading table.
• Select the Expand tables to show all rows checkbox to trigger the feature.
• Render Long Tables must be enabled by an admin and is disabled by default.

New custom visualization and application on the Looker Marketplace

• Force-Directed Graph is a custom visualization. The nodes within the graph are mathematically clustered together based on their relationships with other nodes. The weight of each link (line between nodes) is based on the magnitude of the relationship.
• With the LookML Diagram application, Looker users with permissions to view or develop LookML can select a model and an Explore to visualize their code in an interactive diagram.

Looker 21.0