Teradata

The procedures that are required to connect Looker to a Teradata database depend on your Looker deployment:

Encrypting network traffic

It is a best practice to encrypt network traffic between the Looker application and your database. Consider one of the options described on the Enabling secure database access documentation page.

Installing the hash_md5 user-defined function (UDF)

Before configuring Looker to work with Teradata, you must install the hash_md5 user-defined function (UDF) on your Teradata server. You can find instructions for installing the UDF on this Teradata downloads page.

Installing the Teradata JDBC driver

If you have a Looker (original) instance, you will need to configure a Teradata driver before creating the Looker connection. These instructions describe that process, assuming use of a startup script that is similar to the examples that are provided on the looker-open-source GitHub page.

To install the driver, you will need to acquire two Teradata files, include them as part of the startup process, and add an option to tell Looker to access the driver.

Follow the steps on the Unpackaged JDBC drivers documentation page using the following values:

driver symbol: teradata

driver entry:

- name: teradata
  dir_name: teradata
  module_path: com.teradata.jdbc.TeraDriver

For the step to put the driver in your dialect's directory, the paths to these files will look like this:

  • looker/custom_jdbc_drivers/teradata/tdgssconfig.jar
  • looker/custom_jdbc_drivers/teradata/terajdbc4.jar

Creating the Looker connection to your database

To create the connection from Looker to your database, follow these steps:

  1. In the Admin section of Looker, select Connections, and then click Add Connection.
  2. Select Teradata from the Dialect drop-down menu.
  3. Fill out the connection details. The majority of the settings are common to most database dialects. See the Connecting Looker to your database documentation page for information.
  4. To verify that the connection is successful, click Test. See the Testing database connectivity documentation page for troubleshooting information.
  5. To save these settings, click Connect.

Feature support

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

Teradata supports the following features as of Looker 24.16:

Feature Supported?
Support Level
Supported
Looker (Google Cloud core)
Yes
Symmetric Aggregates
Yes
Derived Tables
Yes
Persistent SQL Derived Tables
Yes
Persistent Native Derived Tables
Yes
Stable Views
Yes
Query Killing
Yes
SQL-based Pivots
Yes
Timezones
No
SSL
No
Subtotals
No
JDBC Additional Params
Yes
Case Sensitive
Yes
Location Type
Yes
List Type
No
Percentile
No
Distinct Percentile
No
SQL Runner Show Processes
No
SQL Runner Describe Table
Yes
SQL Runner Show Indexes
Yes
SQL Runner Select 10
Yes
SQL Runner Count
Yes
SQL Explain
Yes
Oauth Credentials
No
Context Comments
Yes
Connection Pooling
No
HLL Sketches
No
Aggregate Awareness
Yes
Incremental PDTs
No
Milliseconds
Yes
Microseconds
Yes
Materialized Views
No
Approximate Count Distinct
No