Telling a good story with data through a dashboard can be critical to the success of a data pipeline, because data that's difficult to interpret or draw insights from might be useless. After data is in BigQuery, a lot of skill and effort can still be required to uncover insights. To help create an environment where stakeholders can easily interact with and visualize data, Google Cloud offers two solutions, Looker and Google Data Studio. Let's explore both of them, starting with Looker. Looker supports BigQuery, as well as more than 60 different types of SQL database products, commonly referred to as dialects. It allows developers to define a semantic modeling layer on top of databases using Looker Modeling Language or LookML. LookML defines logic and permissions independent from a specific database or SQL language, which frees a data engineer from interacting with individual databases to focus more on business logic across an organization. The Looker platform is 100 percent web-based, which makes it easy to integrate into existing workflows, then share with multiple teams at an organization. There's also a Looker API, which can be used to embed Looker reports in other applications. Let's explore some of Looker's features starting with dashboards. Dashboards, like the Business Pulse dashboard for example, can visualize data in a way that makes insights easy to understand. For a sales organization, it shows figures that many might want to see at the start of the week, like the number of new users acquired, monthly sales trends, and even the number of year-to-date orders. Information like this can help align teams, identify customer frustrations, and maybe even uncover lost revenue. Based on the metrics that are important to your business, you can create Looker dashboards that provide straightforward presentations to help you and your colleagues quickly see a high-level business status. Looker has multiple data visualization options, including area charts, line charts, Sankey diagrams, funnels, and liquid fuel gauges. To share a dashboard with your team, you schedule delivery through storage services like Google Drive, Slack, and Dropbox. Let's explore another Looker dashboard, this time one that monitors key metrics related to New York city taxes over a period of time. This dashboard displays total revenue, total numbers of passengers, and total number of rides. Looker displays this information through a time series to help monitor metrics over time. Looker also lets you plot data on a map to see right distribution, busy areas, and peak hours. The purpose of these features is to help you draw insights to make business decisions. For more training on Looker, please refer to cloud.google.com/training.
