Access to Looker data models from Power BI now generally available

Data is critical to the decision-making process across most types of organizations, but connecting people to the data they need in their workflow can be a challenge. Our vision — to enable users to access and leverage trusted metrics based on accurate, up-to-date, data through the tools they already use — becomes even more real today as we announce general availability of Looker’s governed data connector for Power BI. This new integration enables Power BI users to access centrally defined metrics and data relationships from Looker’s semantic layer through Power BI Desktop.

The value of a semantic layer

Looker’s semantic layer serves as a business representation of the underlying data, separating visualization of that data from its original source, and enabling data engineers and analysts to create business logic and calculations for everyone in an organization to use and reuse. A semantic layer helps scale technical expertise, expands reusability and version control into their SQL, and handles changes and updates efficiently, while also empowering self-service. Users can tap into this layer to access centralized metrics and run queries against the database on-demand, all without knowing SQL themselves or navigating technical complexities of the data.

When a user connects to a Looker semantic model from Power BI, they’re accessing the dimensions, metrics, and join logic defined within Looker, which helps provide consistency across reports. For example, one user might define Total Revenue as a simple sum of sales, while another user might know that promotions and discounts need to be subtracted from the sum of sales when calculating Total Revenue. Defining revenue centrally, with filters and logic applied by default, helps reduce the potential for discrepancies and confusion. And if the definition of a metric changes over time, it can be updated once and propagated across all reporting upon refresh.

Accessing Looker metrics in Power BI

This integration marks Power BI as the third visualization tool the Looker semantic layer works with, in addition to Looker Studio and Connected Sheets. This connectivity is available as of Looker version 23.10 for Looker-hosted customers.

To get started, you will need to do the following:

1. Verify usage requirements and recommendations

2. Enable the connector within Looker

3. Download and save the connector file

4. Set up the connector as a custom connector in Power BI

Once the connector is set up, users can connect to a Looker instance from Power BI Desktop, select an Explore, and then explore that data set using Power BI’s drag-and-drop interface. 

To learn more about Looker and this new offering, visit cloud.google.com/looker.